78th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

Opportunism Rules… A serf’s point of view.

A tree falls in the forest. Death of one tree, opportunity for others as light penetrates to the forest floor and a flurry of saplings reach towards the sky. One or two of them will survive, the rest will die in the shade, too slow to dominate the skyline.

In another geographic zone, a desert environment, there’s the Cactus plant that grows in a cleft of rock, and, less known, the Desert Marygold that grows down Mexico way, germinating in sand in a circular pattern; it’s a clever coloniser, taking advantage of a passing rain squall or a few drops of moisture, its hairy leaves blocking UV rays.

Opportunism rules, in the plant world as in all living species, fish, fowl and mammals, including those that burrow, herd or flock, or we versatile humans. Every living thing impelled to seize the day, Carpe Diem

Opportunist trial and error underlies the evolutionary activities of all living things obliged to respond to signals of fight or flight or food availability in their environment in order to survive. Opportunism became an evolutionary theory with Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species,’ and over a century later, Richard Dawkins,’ ‘The Selfish Gene.’ Darwin’s evolutionary theory held that all life is related and descended from a common ancestor. His theory of Natural Selection is a process in which a species’ random mutations are preserved when they support that species’ survival.

Herewith from Darwin’s autobiography, (p118):

‘In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement, Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animal and plants. It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work; but I was so anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some time to write even the briefest sketch of it. In June 1842 I first allowed myself the satisfaction of writing a very brief abstract of my theory in pencil in 35 pages; and this was enlarged into one of 230 pages; which I had fairly copied out and still possess.’

Richard Dawkins argues in ‘The Selfish Gene’ that it is not the living species, plants, animals and humans, that are the replicators of Natural Selection, our lives are much too fleeting. Our genes, however, survive forever, well almost forever, and they, not us, are the natural candidates for basic selection.

Living species are just survival receptacles for our genes, the master programmers, programming for their own survival. Hence the book’s title, ‘The Selfish Gene.’ Not that a gene can be a conscious, purposeful agent, it is blind natural selection that makes it behave as if were purposeful. And here’s the thing, Dawkins finds that genes are not just selfish, they must also be cooperative. In the making of a human child or other forms of life, each gene has to cooperate in the embryonic development with other genes. No one gene, acting alone, can create a child’s arm or leg or the making of the human eye.

Dawkins says that ‘Embryonic development is controlled by an interlocking web of relationships so complex that we had best not contemplate it.’

He makes an analogy involving a rowboat and oarsman to illustrate how genes may be selfish and cooperative at the same time. The rowboat is the body of the organism, the oarsmen the genes. Each oarsman needs the other oarsmen to fill a rowboat so that he can win a race, hence he has a selfish aim. But in order to win he must cooperate to make a good fit with his team, which is what genes do, collaborating to ensure a body’s survival. Dawkins uses this analogy to show how examples of cooperation in nature can mask selfish motivations.

Dawkins also identifies a second replicator that he calls a ‘meme,’ that has evolved much later than genes in our world’s evolutionary history, mainly through human transmission. Memes are those ideas, theories, catch phrases, songs, technical processes etc that make up changing human cultures.

Dawkins’ memes argument is yet another theory identifying the changes in human creativity setting us apart from other living species that resulted from language development beyond signalling.

This development allowed momentous trial and error opportunism, development of tools, invention of the wheel by an unknown genius, development of the arts by people, inspiring paintings like Michelangelo’s fresco’s in the Sistine Chapel, writing and Shakespeare’s tragedies, architecture and Brunelleschi’s dome on the church of Santa Maria del Fiore, sublime music like Beethoven’s symphonies, mathematics and working out directions when lost at sea, engineering like Brunel’s suspension bridge over the Avon River, and there’s agriculture, including Norman Borlaug’s wheat developments that saved more than a million people from starvation… and yes, we know, other developments less propitious.

Lots of implications may be drawn from the drive of opportunism as a basis of life, implications of how human cultures may best allow for this evolutionary fact and respond to its political ramifications, issues of freedom and control.

Freedom, Control and Us.

Writing in 1938 and in the dark days of World War 11, when it looked like Hitler’s attempts at world dominance might succeed, Karl Popper’s two-volume book, ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies,’ gave a reasoned appeal for upholding the open society of rational argument against the fascist propaganda and violent actions of Hitler’s Germany. His book expresses Popper’s felt need to critically examine totalitarianism in its various guises and to defend the values of open, democratic society that were being threatened.

In ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies,’ Popper examines the flawed doctrine of historicism, that supposedly conforms to laws of development – equating the Social Sciences with physical nature. Historicism is the doctrine of historical necessity and human destiny, expounded by Plato, Hegel and Karl Marx and still influential today, Plato formulating an ideal republic based on his theory of forms, Hegel combating liberalism in the authoritarian state of Prussia’s King Frederic William III, and Marx in industrial England, arguing inexorable laws of social development and class war.

Popper speaks against the influence of powerful leaders invoking destiny to support their authoritarian theories. He argues the importance of checks and balances to control the power of governments over their people, and favours open society for the citizens, who best know their own interests, and who only require that freedom to be constrained where it impinges on the freedom of someone else.

In the preface to his book on Plato, Hegel and Karl Marx, Popper says:

‘If in this book harsh words are spoken against some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilisation is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whom civilisation depends, and to divide them. The responsibility for this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By our reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.’

Plato’s Noble Cause Corruption.

In Popper’s first volume, ‘The Spell of Plato,’ he describes Plato’s blueprint for a utopian society, a return to static tribal society. Plato wrote ‘The Republic,’ as a response to his belief in the inevitable decay of all things from their original perfect form. Plato believed that it was only possible to break this ‘law’ by establishing an authoritarian hierarchical State which he formulated based on his myth of the metals in men, gold, silver and bronze, where only a philosopher king selected from the gold caste should rule.

Here’s the result of living in Plato’s hierarchical State:

‘The greatest principle of all, ‘ says Plato, ‘is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative; neither out of zeal nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace – to his leader he shall direct his eye and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matter he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up or move, or wash, or take his meals, only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it.’ (The Spell of Plato. Chapter 1.)

Raison d’Etat and Hegel.

If you listen to Hegel, things can’t go wrong in the powerful State. ‘The Universal is to be found in the State.’ writes Hegel…’The State is the Divine idea as it exists on Earth.’
Where Plato saw history moving away from perfection towards decay, Hegel teaches the reverse, an historical trend towards a self-realising higher good.

Motivated by self interest, official philosopher of the authoritarian rule of Frederick William III of Prussia, Hegel debauched language and logic to support his historicist dogma. Hegel replaced logic with his own form of argument that he called Dialectics. Employing sophistry, Hegel argued that contradictions in an argument do not matter. He argued this by claiming that contradictions are ‘welcome in science’ as a means of scientific progress. He doesn’t add that this is because contradictions in science point to flaws in and these flawed theories with their contradictions can now be eliminated from the ongoing enquiry. Hegel focuses on the phrase, ‘welcome in science’ and omits the rest. He is turning the argument on its head, he is claiming that contradiction is welcome in argument, per se. This destroys criticism in argument and by doing so Hegel makes his own philosophy secure from critical attack.

Popper concludes that we need to take Hegel’s false doctrine seriously because it has had incalculable influence on fascist and Marxist political philosophies and is still very powerful in the social and political sciences today. (O.S. Vol 2, p.30.)

Marx misconstrues.

‘It is tempting to dwell upon the similarities between Marxism, the Hegelian left wing, and its fascist counterparts,’ says Popper, ‘Yet it would be utterly unfair to overlook the difference between them. Although their intellectual origin is nearly identical, there can be no doubt of the humanitarian impulse of Marxism. Moreover, in contrast to the Hegelians of the right wing, Marx made an honest attempt to apply rational methods to the most urgent problems of social life. The value of this attempt is unimpaired by the fact that it was, as I shall try to show, largely unsuccessful.’ (O.S.Vol 2. p81.)

Popper pays tribute to Marx identifying the importance of situational analysis and economic conditions as a basis for understanding human history, Marx’s materialism, or ‘economism’, says Popper, ‘is insightful but only so long as it is not sweepingly interpreted as the doctrine that all social development depends upon economic conditions, which is palpably false. The history of Marxism itself furnishes examples that clearly falsify Marx’ exaggerated economism, for example, it was Lenin’s ‘ideas’ expressed in slogans that became a driving force of the Russian Revolution. (p108.)

Popper argues that the historicism of Karl Marx is itself a strand of an intellectual tradition from Plato to Hegel, which viewed history as a process of necessity, whereby nothing we can do will avert what is to be. The arguments underlying Marx’s historical prophesy are invalid. ‘Marx ‘s ingenious attempt to draw prophetic conclusions from observations of contemporary economic tendencies failed.’ (p193.) The conditions of the working classes under capitalism did not worsen, leading to social revolution, as Marx predicted, instead they markedly improved. Nor did the State wither away, but conversely, its power, under Stalin, increased.

Popper is arguing maximum freedom for each individual citizen citing Immanuel Kant’s dictum that the freedom of man must not be restricted beyond what is necessary to safeguard an equal freedom for all.’ (O.S.Vol 2, p44.)

Popper’s critical attitude regarding the habit of deference to great men is supported by the American economist Thomas Sowell. Sowell describes his own experience in academia and working for government which taught him how many intellectuals are attracted to visionary thinking, he calls this ‘the vision of the anointed,’ which is based on confident idealism unsupported by checks on the data.

Thomas Sowell’s view of visionary thinking and the great man.

In his book, ‘A Conflict of Visions,’ Sowell identifies two conflicting visions that fundamentally apply to how we look at human nature. There’s the constrained vision of human nature, a view that human nature is fundamentally of a flawed and fixed nature. Then there’s the unconstrained view that human nature is a blank slate and human suffering lies in the failure of other people to remedy injustice, and there is no other reason for human suffering.

These two visions, Sowell observes, the constrained and unconstrained visions, can be seen throughout history from Adam Smith to Rousseau, from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Barrack Obama. The first places reliance on experience of the many, evolving over time, and the setting up of checks and balances in law to control monopolies on power- no single person is capable of learning everything by just figuring it out; whereas your unconstrained individual is less distrusting of State power and will argue that we just need someone to come along and fix the law. Sowell distrusts individuals who make their own constitutional interpretations as ad hoc decision making whereby we no longer have law.

Thoughts in conclusion…

Maximize the freedom of the individual, minimize the power of government, encourage creativity and entrepreneurship with some legal provisos against long term monopoly of an industry. We can’t predict the outcome of these trial and error actions but trial and error is Nature’s way and without it we would stagnate and die.

As with the natural world, the economist Joseph Schumpeter observed that our human economic systems involve dynamic disequilibrium. As he saw it, the profit earned by an entrepreneur is the cost of staying in business, which not only benefits the entrepreneur but benefits investors and others. For example, in the high-risk restaurant business, when the restaurateur succeeds, his employees and customers benefit also. However, when he doesn’t succeed, he and his investors have to pay the cost and not the rest of us. (Conversely, with the failed enterprises of governments, it is the citizens that pay the bill.)

Regarding minimizing government, government is not good at creating, other than red tape. And remember that government officials are opportunistic also… and rarely will their objectives coincide with ours.

Serf doing that unconstrained-vision-thing…

What to do? Reduce Government you cits, it’s in your own interest. Revisit those constitutional constraints on power creep. Something along the lines of setting up a lean and mean citizen task committee on the line of jury duty with some well respected retired legal expert as adviser, and a few politicians from conflicting sides of the political spectrum to assist. The task force to operate every few years, with different members, each time, tasked with identifying failure of checks and balances, actions not in accordance with the Constitution and suggesting ways of compliance. If judged legal, the task force’s findings to be acted upon within a set time and in a public manner.

The same process should be adopted, regularly, to see that our main public institutions are fulfilling their fundamental duties, specific questions, for example, concerning whether the Education Department or the Teacher’s Unions are over-riding key educational aims for students.

Curtailing power creep? Yeah – it sounds unlikely doesn’t it? There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, between framed aims and finding means…but serfs think a way urgently needs to be found – and we have come back from the brink before.

77th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

A Serf’s Primer on Human Language.

 

Words, words, words. Hamlet.. Act 11. Sc 11.

 

Roughly translated:
I am Xerxes, king of kings, king of the lands, king of all the languages, the son of Darius.
May Ahuramazda, the greatest of gods, protect me and my kingdom.

Herman Melville says in his written epic quest for the White Whale:

How then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms!

For Melville, the act of penning his thoughts concerning such a Leviathan requires all the panamas of empire on earth and beyond. Likewise, to write adequately about human language, spoken and written, with it’s bright and dark influences on human experience, Herculean effort is required. Hence a serf’s opting to write a primer… cunning, eh! Dictionary definition: Primer: A small introductory book on a subject.

It begins…

Probably our greatest human creation is the creation of spoken language, beyond the signalling of birds and other animal species, our human creation of descriptive language and later, of critical language, the language of philosophical and scientific enquiry.

A second great invention was the invention of writing, allowing us to reflect upon, and widely share our experiences and opinions. Sometime around 3000 BC, in Southern Mesopotamia, Sumerians invented written symbols that corresponded to our spoken language, incising pictographs on clay tablets. This early form of writing was later followed by the Phoenician invention of a phonetic alphabet and squiggles on papyrus that soon spread around the Mediterranean world by way of these early Phoenician traders, to develop the written languages that became so integral to Western cultural developments.

The bright side…

How useful our spoken language has been for humans in their day to day interactions…

“Ï smell smoke.”

“Has that cheese order arrived yet?”

“I will be home late.”

“Someone call the fire brigade!”

How life changing has been the descriptive function of language for we humans. Only with this function of human language has the regulative idea of truth arisen, that is, of a description that fits the facts… or regarding literary creation, of fictional characters and their situations that we recognise as ‘ true’ to our understanding of the scope of human behaviour, given potent circumstances, the Achilles’ heel of tragedy, character as fate.

And how auspicious has been the creation of writing and critical language in developing Western philosophic and scientific knowledge, a process that began in Greece, over two and a half thousand years ago. ‘All things are made of water’, said the sage Thales of Miletus, (624 – 546 BC.) and with that hypothesis, was heralded in a new and non-magical way of observing reality. As referred to above, critical science and descriptive literature are both to be expanded upon in this Primer.

The bright side of language is benign, illuminating, even bewitching – but in a good way. Also to be explored, the dark side of language, language that is not benign, designed to exert control over someone else’s thinking. Sometimes it, too, may be bewitching, sometimes intended to baffle, preventing those targeted from seeing what is taking place, smoke and mirror techniques, distortion and camouflage. Another dark way to control an individual or group is by making them language – bereft, by limiting language as in George Orwell’s ‘1984:’ What can’t be said can’t be thought.

How bewitching!

On the bewitchment of great literature – of poetry, drama or the novel, here’s a poem about poetry by Emily Dickenson:

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any courser like a Page
Of prancing poetry –
This Travel may the poorest take
Without offence or Toll –
How Frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.

So much going on in this seemingly simple verse. First thing to be observed is its
connotative language, someone unable to read figurative language would find this poem incomprehensible. Unless we can visualise a book as a ‘ship’ taking us to new intellectual or emotional lands or view a page as a spirited horse, we cannot understand the poem. From the simile ‘like a book’ to the metaphor ‘frugal chariot,’ the reader is obliged to be open to connotative meaning, a meaning that emerges from its imagery reinforced by dramatic patterning, not by abstract truth sustained by argument.

In this poem, Emily Dickenson identifies what good literature does, which is to transport us to other worlds than the one we ourselves experience, worlds however strange, that are somehow recognisable to us, peopled by characters, however exotic, that we can recognise as being, in some ways, kin to us.

Here is a stanza from W. H. Auden’s poem,’ The Fall of Rome:’

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

The strange imagery of the silent reindeer and the golden moss is remote and enchanting. The patterning of sound, of ‘the sibilant ‘s’ in ‘across’ and ‘moss’ and picked up in the words ‘miles’ and ‘silently,’ together with the ‘l’ sound repeated throughout, are seductive to the ear and make the experience vivid to us. More of patterning anon.

Concerning literature taking us elsewhere, nothing could be stranger than Homer’s Odyssey taking us back to the Bronze Age and Odysseus’ returning from the Trojan Wars, being blown off course and visiting strange shores, Calypso’s island and the land of the Cyclops. Taking us elsewhere – there’s Dante’s journey to the infernal regions of Hell, complete with the map of which damned souls fit where, depending on how heinous the sin. And, of course, Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrimage, psychologically acute and ironic, a pilgrimage involving some less than devout story telling by the pilgrims.

And who can overlook Lewis Carroll’s Alice falling down the rabbit hole to the inverted world of Wonderland – so many word games and challenges to the world above ground?

These journeys were built by words and the literary tricks of the writer’s armoury. The use of metaphor, strengthened by alliteration and other verbal patterning were never more powerfully used than in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth.’ The whole play is a metaphor on ‘darkness’, exploring the descent into darkness of Macbeth and his wife, darkness being equated with moral degradation, the absence of light or ‘enlightenment.’

Early in the play, there’s the witches’ incantation:

Fair is foul and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

And here, Macbeth waiting for nightfall to carry out his plan to kill his royal guest, is watching the light fade and intimating his new allegiance with night’s dark agents:

Light thickens
And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.

The verbal repetition of sounds and words, is strong… Fair is foul and foul is fair. We love regularities. As a small child might protest when its mother, at the beginning of summer, in the child’s dressing routine, leaves off the socks that have always accompanied shoes, so we all are reassured by regularities in daily life, events we can expect. We would find it impossible to survive in a world where everything happens without rhyme or reason, a Wonderland where babies suddenly turn into pigs, or we grow or shrink in size in just a few minutes, merely by nibbling one side of a mushroom.

We are always looking for patterns, sometimes even when no pattern exists. This survivalist attraction to patterns, I think, accounts for why we are drawn to language pattern also, it is associated with our existence, it gives us a good feeling We enjoy alliteration like ‘fair and foul,’ enjoy rhyme, ‘fair and air,’ and even less obvious patterns like repeated vowel sounds, as in ‘rooky wood.’

Another pattern important to the fusion of sound and sense, meter in poetry and drama, helping to convey meaning and give tone, gravity or exuberance, merriment or melancholy, indignation or explosive rage. You noticeably experience it in music.

Master Shakespeare and Iambic Pentameter.

One of the great developments of Shakespeare’s tragedies was his development of the iambic pentameter, ten syllable, five stress line. The iambic pentameter seems to best fit the natural rhythm of our language, allowing variations of rhythm to accommodate the hero’s charismatic voice, as in Hamlet’s soliloquy To be /or not/to be/that is /the question/ enabling him to express complex thoughts. Here in Shakespeare’s Othello we can listen to changes in his language to mirror his declining mental state. In Act 1, his measured language in keeping the peace:

Keep up your bright swords for the dew will rust them,
Good signor, you shall more command with years
Than with your weapons.

Then in Act 3 cursing his innocent wife in one syllable expletives:

Damn her, lewd witch, O damn her, damn her.

Showing Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter metre and other dramatic elements acting together in a more modern poem, here’s a stanza from Dylan Thomas’ poem, ‘The Hand That Signed the Paper’:

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five fingers did a king to death.

From the relentless, driving rhythm of lines mainly composed of one syllable words, did a king to death, to the metaphoric and ironic image of five sovereign fingers signing a chain of command that creates havoc for a city and beyond, this figurative language shows how powerful, connotative literature can be.

More on the bright side…
Language that probes reality… you guess and test.

Regarding these guesses, Karl Popper’s writings and Richard Feynman lectures focus on the importance of conjecture and refutation in the practice of science. Making hypotheses is the way we learn. Every observation we make is a tentative hypothesis we ask nature, a process of trial and error. Induction, David Hume’s view of how we seek knowledge, by habit, the passive collection of facts, is a myth. By adopting the trial and error method, posing hypotheses that may be refuted or corroborated by experience of a public nature, a searchlight or deductive approach to problem situations, is how our scientific understanding of the world advances. Once public, a scientist’s theory, no matter how attached to it that scientist may be, is exposed to the cold light of day, can be tested by others, and can even produce unexpected consequences that its creator did not foresee.

In 6th century B.C. Greece, some two hundred years after the epic poetic works of Homer, a new revolution in language began with the asking of general questions about nature, a disinterested, non-mystical speculation that brought us philosophy and science.

Beginning in Miletus with Thales’ hypothesis, ‘All things are made of water.’ other powerful thinkers were soon posing probing hypotheses concerning the nature of reality. And while they lacked telescopes or microscopes, these thinkers used logical and mathematical arguments to test their guesses. A second great Milesian philosopher, Anaximander, criticised the theory of his predecessor, Thales. He asked why should we choose water? The primary stuff that things are made of cannot be one of its own special forms. If any of these forms were the basic matter, it would have long since overcome the others. Basic matter must therefore be something different from these, something more fundamental.

Concerning the origin of man, Anaximander held an extremely modern view. Observing that the human young need a long period of care and protection, he concluded that if we were always as we are now, we could not have survived. Therefore humans must have evolved from an animal which is able to fend for itself more quickly.’ (In Bertrand Russell ‘Wisdom of the West’.) This kind of argument, later called a reductio ad absurdem, entails that from a given assumption, you deduce something that is manifestly wrong, ‘humans could not have survived,’ and hence the assumption must be rejected.

From Miletus to Samos and the Pythagoran School giving rise to a scientific and mathematical tradition, then to Athens and Anaxagorus hypothesising the infinite divisibility of matter, an hypothesis that later contributed to Democritus of Abdera formulating his Theory of Atoms. In Athens, Socrates practised his famous dialectical enquiry and Plato posed his influential Theory of Forms. Aristotle, a past student of Plato developed a logic argument, the syllogism, that focused on identifying contradiction in argument. The syllogism is an argument with two premises, subject and predicate, that have one term in common. If both premises are true, then the conclusion is validly derived, if one or both are untrue, it is not.

Athen’s golden age came to an end when political instability in the Hellenistic Period resulted in a general decay of intellectual standards throughout Greece, the Greek intellectual heritage came to rely on the curators of libraries and transmission by way of the Roman Empire. But before this happened, powerful thinkers in Alexandria made important contributions to science.

One potent thinker was Aristarchus of Samos, who, in the third century B.C, developed the first heliocentric model of our universe. His theory placed the sun at the centre of the universe, with the Earth revolving around the sun once a year and the earth rotating on its axis once a day. Also in Alexandria, Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician and chief librarian at the Alexandria Library. a generation after Aristarchus, calculated to an accurate degree the circumference of Earth.

Eratosthenes recognized that the Earth was a sphere, and knew that in Alexandria’s neighbouring city of Syene, no vertical shadow was cast at noon on the summer solstice. In Alexandria Eratosthenes planted a stick in the ground on the same day at noon, to see if it cast a shadow. It cast a seven degree shadow which meant that if the world is spherical then Syene and Alexandria are seven degrees apart. Eratosthenes hired someone to measure that distance, which was about eight hundred km in our measurements. He them calculated seven degrees as part of a circle, 1/50th of 360 degrees, so 50 x 800 = 40,000 kilometres, which is close to the actual measurement.

After the Fall of Rome and the onset of a period known as the Dark Ages, the theories of those Greek thinkers languished in Medieval libraries until some medieval scholars began to resurrect them. Of central importance was the rediscovery of the heliocentric system by Copernicus, which appeared in print in 1543. On the margin of one of Copernicus’ manuscripts is written the name Aristarchus. (B.Russell. Ibid.P101.) It was in the wake of this revival of ancient modes of speculation that the great scientific revolution of the 17th century began. And with the invention of the printing press and translation of these theories from the Greek to other languages, there was a greater dissemination of these and other hypotheses regarding physical nature and human learning.

With this revolution came another period of disinterested investigation into the natural world, notably by astronomers such as Galileo and the indefatigable Isaac Newton, by the curiosity-motivated investigations into the mutability of living species by Charles Darwin, and by James Hutton, exploring the geological processes and age of our Earth.

Regarding knowledge preserved in books and libraries Karl Popper puts forward an important hypothesis. Popper distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge, subjective knowledge and objective knowledge. He refers to the physical world as ‘World 1’, he refers to the world of our conscious experience as ‘World 2’ and our theories and arguments he calls ‘World 3.’ Popper argues that this world really exists, its theories can have significance beyond their creators’ expectations. He argues that only with the descriptive function of human language can the regulative idea of truth appear, that is, description that fits the facts, and only with the ex-somatic written language that exists in our libraries, which like a tool, develops outside our bodies, (World 3) can a theory become independent of its creator, subjected to standards of rational criticism, maybe leading to the generation of new problems and theories.

Language as a tool of power.

It is the reluctance to accept the existence of this third world which perhaps constitutes the central problem of the humanities departments of Academia where the relativism of Post Modernism rules… the theory that there is no Truth, there is only Power.

Say, haven’t Post Modernists presented their power theory as a true theory, so isn’t this a contradiction in their theory? Not to worry. As in Wonderland, contradiction does not matter in a Post Modernist world since here is no truth to act as constraint. One theory is as good as any other. This is the darker, illogical side of language.

Flash back to Athens, there is a group called the Sophists, Socrates was charged with being one but he wasn’t, who believed that knowledge of the real world was unattainable by humans so that what mattered was useful opinion. The Sophists acted as itinerant teachers who, for a fee, instructed in rhetoric, in how to handle yourself in the political assembly or law courts … how to make the worse case appear the better, the art of persuasion, smoke and mirrors. This rhetorical tradition has continued into modern times, we are bombarded with messaging all the time.

The printing press has its dark side as well its ability to enhance enquiry. We have to be able to hear different sides of an argument and evidence presented. And with the spread of modern communication mediums from radio to internet and hand phones, it is of crucial importance to uphold free speech and non-censorship of differing voices. The problem with censorship is that one coterie gets to decide what may be heard, and that is the coterie which has a hold on power.

Taking a walk on the dark side…

Taking a walk on the dark side involves language employed to bewitch and baffle. Techniques borrowed from literature are used, not as in literature to expand a reader’s consciousness, but employed to narrow consciousness, to rob one’s target audience of their self possession. It is used in marketing products and in marketing political ideas, it’s called Propaganda, all those patterning techniques employed in easy to remember slogans that beguile… rhyme, alliteration and assonance, repetition of words, use of emotive imagery. herewith some examples:

All the way with L.B.J.

Build back better!

Give me liberty or give me death!

Workers of the world unite!

There ‘s creation of a scenario, like the Malboro Man Cigarette Ad that sells smoking a particular brand of cigarettes to men as a form of rugged individualism, and there’s the campaign, Torches of Freedom by Dr Edward Bernays, selling cigarette smoking to women, using the Easter Parade as a public venue to orchestrate a group of attractive women, hired by Bernays, to light cigarettes in unison as they marched in the parade. Smoking cigarettes becomes linked to freedom. and physical attractiveness.

Dr Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud, was known as the father of propaganda by his conscious application of propaganda techniques, though we know it’s been around for much longer.

Dr Bernay’s writings influenced Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister in Hitler’s Third Reich in the Second World War where he persecuted Jewish citizens in an unrelenting campaign of racial vilification followed by their transportation to death camps.

After the war, a large diary dictated by Goebbels, (translated by Louis Lochner, 1950.) set out his basic principles of propaganda, very like the Marxist activist Rudi Dutsche’s long march through the Institutions and also the programs of more recent activists. Goebbel’s basic principles were:

Avoid abstract ideas – appeal to the emotions.

Constantly repeat just a few ideas.

Give only one side of an argument.

Constantly criticise your opponent.

Once we humans are caught up in emotive language it becomes difficult to disengage. Present one motherhood statement or obvious fact and your target audience is disposed to accepting your ensuing proposition. Use all those patterning tricks and lull your audience’s critical faculties, the audience are primed to accept ad hominem and one-sided arguments, unlikely to check on source material or listen to counter claims. Bewitchment rules.

And so does bafflement, keeping your target audience confused. This is the reverse of the language of Science where it is important for the presenter of a theory and its evidence to aim for clarity of expression. The genuine scientist wants his or her hypothesis and argument to be understood, ultimately to be accepted or refuted in relation to a real world. Truth to data is its test, connotative and ambiguous language are to be avoided in scientific methodology.

Language intended to baffle…

If the presenter’s language is ambiguous, perhaps laden with jargon, it is likely that it is intended to impress rather than clarify and the reader is entitled to suspect that this is pseudo-science, motivated by the desire for money and status or for some political goal.

Regarding post modernist jargon, you may remember the Alan Sokal Hoax of the 1990’s. Alan Sokal, a mathematics’ professor wrote a Paper entitled Transgressing the Boundaries. Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Although Sokal’s paper, claiming that gravity is a social construct, was a deliberate fabrication of errors and illogical statements that would be obvious to any one with an understanding of physics, it got published. Sokal later declared that if post modernist believe that gravity is a social context they were welcome to support their view by jumping from the window of his apartment on the twenty-first floor of a high-rise building… I don’t think the offer was accepted.

Unfortunately, Alan Sokal’s Hoax has not stopped the spread of Post Modernism in Academia, initially beginning in the Humanities Department but now in Science Departments also. Because truth is denied in Post Modernism, whatever statement suits the Marxist message of exploiter versus victim will be used, no matter how it contradicts experience. Where there is no regulator other than power, there are no real world constraints; it may be said that men are able to bear children, that there is no difference between men and women.

Anything that experience has shown to be the actual case may be denied. People were able to change their views when the Heliocentric Theory challenged the Ptolemy Theory or Darwin’s Theory of Evolution challenged the Chain Of Being Theory, because we could see real world evidence for these two theories. But it baffles us when we know in our human experience, as well as in the world of mammals and birds, that males and females are not the same.

Postmodernism can be criticised, not just for baffling us by its use of obtuse language masking absurdities. Baffling also is the Post Modernist ploy to reduce our use of language. We need words in order to be able to think about a problem. If our language is limited, our thinking is reduced, as the writer George Orwell showed in his 1984 totalitarian State enforcement of the Newspeak language Ingsoc upon the population. Any form of censorship narrows the framework by which we make decisions.

Post Modernism began in Western Universities but has its roots in Marxism. Marxism has a theory of class conflict that later became unpopular with many followers following the publicizing of its Gulags, show trials and food shortages. Needing a new cause that could by pass this history, it settled on Critical Race Theory (See the writings of Marxists Ernesto Lacciau and Chantal Mouffe, 2001) a new Marxist slant on oppressor and victim, in which free speech is limited for white people, especially white males, who are deemed solely responsible for the history of the slave trade (and will ever be so) in a distorted history that permits only one narrow point of view.

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Words, words, words. So much more could be written than you’ll find in this little essay, so much more than one serf can understand or, in fact, than can be understood by even the world’s most knowledgeable language experts.

The Universe is infinite, or so we think, and acquiring human knowledge is such a miniscule and fraught enterprise, that we need societies with the acquired experiences of the many, based on trial and error; not ruled by a few who think they have the key to how life should be lived and thereby the right to impose their view, likely a false view, upon others by any means they think fit.

 

76th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

Musings on human invention of the wheel, of metaphor and other things.

Been wondering about the invention of the wheel. Since writing my Serf 74th edition essay on human nature I find myself musing about one of our most important inventions… so many adaptations so many impacts on human history. I got to wondering about the humans who invented the wheel and the process involved, the wheel’s necessary connection with the axle, they had to be invented in one go, a wheel is not operative without an axle. The wheel was a sophisticated invention, its creators had to be a lot like their modern descendants.

Regarding human learning, the take away from my essay on human nature, we’re opportunistic, active learners, Karl Popper’s Search Light Theory of learning is more applicable to us than the blank slate passive Bucket Theory of learning. Problem-orientated trial and error is our favoured mode of enquiry and inventing.

Trial and error is a response to some perceived problem. While our inventions can be serendipitous, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of Penicillin for example, a society is less likely to be innovative when people feel happy as they are…when they don’t think there’s a particular problem needing a solution.

Nothing comes from nothing. No such thing as the innocent eye and humans are an innovative species. One of the reasons is because of our capacity for metaphor. We just can’t help it, our language is riddled with it. In our conversations we speak of dark deeds or seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Our newspapers describe political actors as sitting on the fence, or publish cartoons depicting the Ship of State Capsizing or the political balance of power Teetering on a See-saw.

A metaphor’s essential value resides in its creative stimulation to enable us to discover new ways of thinking or doing things.

‘Says art historian Ernst Gombric, in his essay on metaphor in ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse:’ ‘The possibility of metaphor springs from the elasticity of the human mind and testifies to its capacity to perceive and assimilate new experiences as modifications of earlier ones, of finding equivalences in the most disparate phenomena, and of substituting one for another.’ (P14.)

A chicken or egg kind of question regarding wheels.

It seems that the potter’s wheel came before the cart wheel. Not so surprising when you consider that making pots from clay was an ancient invention, a creation of hunter gatherer groups. Archaeological digs have found shards and reconstructed them to date findings in China to as early as 18000 years before the present and have even found one small intact pot in Japan, the Jomon Pot, dated to 15000-13000BP.

The earliest potter’s wheel appears to have been invented in Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East as a late development in pottery at a time when some hunter gatherer groups had evolved into an agricultural society. This took place around 12-11KA and was a period when pottery became important for storing grain and other produce.

Potters before this time had found it saved energy to use a turning base when fashioning soft clay to make pots, which they mainly formed by a method of squeezing out coils of clay and pinching then into shape, a technique used across the globe. Archaeological finds show imprints on the base of pots that indicate that potters made use of a turning base, maybe a piece of shard or a leaf or piece of wood that they could rotate instead of physically walking around the pot. Appears feasible as a trial and error development, the move to a non-angular, smooth shape like old Sol or the harvest moon lighting up the night sky.

The oldest form of the potter’s wheel, called a slow wheel, probably developed as an extension of this ancient procedure. Hand turned tourettes of this kind were in use around 4500 BC in the Middle East.

The first potter’s wheels did not make use of centrifugal forces in the technique of ‘throwing’ pottery. This came later, as revealed in archaeology, later pottery being more symmetrical with telltale markers of horizontal lines and thinner rims on pots. Developments of later potter’s wheels exploited this faster method of making pots and went on to refine it by introducing the fly wheel, attached by an axle to a kick wheel below the rotary disc, leaving the potters’ hands free to work on their pots.

Potter’s wheel and fly wheel…

So was the wheeled cart inspired by the earlier invention of the potter’s wheel? It would only take a person to have lifted one of those turntable wheels onto its side and rested it against a wall, and someone, a kind of middle eastern James Watt rolling it to another place, to see another possibility for its use, especially considering that carrying heavy burdens was a perennial problem in those agricultural societies.

Cometh the cart … eventually. The Bronocice Pot, discovered in Poland and dating to at least 3,370 BC, inscribed on its surface the image of a cart and axle, is believed to be the first evidence of the invention of a wheeled vehicle. Beginning of big changes, chariots of fire and the rest!

Back to those early pots, looks like their construction arose out of earlier basket making.

Concerning the basket case…

There’s a book by David J Cohen ‘The Advent and Spread of Early Pottery in East Asia,’ that presents evidence for the spread of pottery from China, Japan and Russia, in the Pleistocene period, an age of hunter gatherer people. Cohen looks at evidence that pots from these places reveal the imprinting of cord marks and basket -like impressions on their surfaces. In China pottery shards at Yuchanyan and Xianrendong cave sites show bag shaped jars with basket markings. The pottery is dated to between 18000-20000 years old. In Japan in the northern island sites, pottery dated between 15000-13000 BP show similar markings. In the Jomon site in Japan, a small intact pot built from coils and pressed fibres was found, the oldest pot known in existence. Here with a link with photographs of pottery discussed in Cohen’s book.

Evidence indicates that these first pots were made by plastering the outsides of baskets with clay (like swallows’ nests) and letting them dry in the sun. Putting these baskets in a fire would later harden the clay and burn the baskets, leaving basket imprints on the pots. These pots could be used for cooking acorn porridge or bone marrow soup or maybe carrying embers from the fire on to the hunters’ next camp site.

Regarding those bag-shaped, basket-textured pots, and regarding metaphor as creative stimulation to new ideas, could our ancestors have discovered the art of basket making by observing birds’ nest-building? Hunter gatherers would have been close observers (and robbers) of nests, and our invention of baskets likely began our human process of making receptacles to hold our nuts and acorns by thinking about birds’ nests. Should we thank our feathered friends, and our facility for metaphor, for a chain of events that lead, indirectly, to the discovery of the cart wheel?

Trigger warning – and ending with a twist.

What have I been doing in this essay? Have I shown that the development of the wheel in human history was enabled by our tendency to look at the world in metaphorical ways, here, specifically, via pottery manufacture and observation of nature’s example of birds’ building nests as receptacles for their eggs?

Of course not. My hypothesis is not based on enough information to be anything other than pie in the sky. No way, given our distance from the event, can we verify or falsify any conclusions about how the wheel originated, other than observing some approximately dated archaeological and funerary artefacts that show us that the potter’s wheel appears to have preceded the cart wheel…. We’re not even sure if domestication of the horse came before the cart or after it!

Too little evidence to show how the wheel was invented, but this does not stop us from formulating a coherent narrative, to explain what could have happened. Sometimes, when there are sufficient contextual clues, as in evidence based historical studies, this logic of the situation can be justified. Like in scientific investigation, first we guess and then we test. But what I did here is not justifiable. What really happened is lost in the mists of time.

So what does my little thought experiment demonstrate? It demonstrates our human capacity to fool ourselves with narratives of could and might and may be that too easily morph into is so. Humans are myth-makers plus, our metaphors, like the puppet Pinocchio, can easily come to life. It pays to be sceptical, take what you hear or read with a pinch of salt…

What I have been doing in my musings on the wheel demonstrates how easily we engage in metaphor. Sometimes in the arts and science we do this to good effect, sometimes, as visionary narrative or deliberate propaganda, it is done to the detriment of those who carelessly, or too trustingly, allow themselves to fall for a persuasive fiction masquerading as fact.

75th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

Be not afeared.

These are the written words of the immortal bard spoken by Caliban in The Tempest when he tells two recent arrivals to his island not to fear the islands sounds, divers strange hummings and voices in the air.

‘Be not afeared.’ That message might apply to people today, coming out of virus lockdown and media prediction of pending doom. So let us begin by imitating the less afeared, the happy wanderer walking out in Nature… Herewith three well known essayists, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Hazlitt and Henry David Thoreau walking not for destination but less tangible things on which they more or less agree.

‘He who is indeed of the brotherhood,’ says Stevenson in his essay Walking Tours ‘does not voyage in quest of the picturesque , but of certain jolly humours…He cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on, or takes it off with more delight. The excitement of the departure puts him in key for that of arrival. Whatever he does is not only a reward in itself, but will further be rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an endless chain.’

For Stevenson this walking tour is a solitary event. Hazlitt agrees and goes further. In Going a Journey he says: ‘The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty to think feel, do, just as one pleases. We go on a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others.’

For Thoreau, too, walking is a solitary event. In his treatise titled Walking he sets out how the primal act of mobility connects us with our essential wildness ‘All good things are wild and free,’ says Thoreau. He views walking as a spiritual act undertaken for its own sake.

So when a-wandering you go, go alone, leave your phone at home, and as Hazlitt in says, free yourself of all impediments. One of those impediments, as noted by Caliban, those strange voices in the air. So many of these voices today in this electronic age of communication, constant ‘keep safe ‘ messaging, admonitions from government and media telling us to think this and do that.

Here is H.L. Mencken’s astute observation regarding government and media messaging:

‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety ) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’

This is a necessary reminder because Nature has made us, like all living things, to be opportunistic, we can’t help being self serving. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations has relevant words concerning self interest. He observes that we as individuals each know and serve our own interest best and should be largely free to do this. He also notes that when people are able to do so, society as a whole benefits: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect to eat our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests.’

There are those, however, who in serving their own interests, certainly do not serve ours’. Adam Smith is more critical when governments follow their own interests because in so doing they fail to serve the interests of those they are purported to serve Says Adam Smith: ‘There is no art which one government sooner learns from one another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.”

Things that re-order your world view…

And one of the things governments and their bureaucracies like to do is create dependency in those they govern. Government and bureaucracies are great empire builders and one of the ways they do this is by adopting fear tactics such as targeting a scapegoat, which populations suffering from anxiety are quick to accept.

There’s a post citing three well known researchers of the human mind, Carl Jung, creator of the theory of human shared ancestral memories, similar to instincts in animals, Dr Joost Meerloo, imprisoned by the Nazis in the 1940s and later becoming a researcher into the brainwashing phenomena, and Professor of Psychiatry, Silvano Ariete, known for his long and successful experience in treating Schizophrenia. The latter two, I consider, argue more tested hypotheses than Jung’s ancestral theory.

The post begins with Jung’s claim that we humans are our own worst enemy, that we each struggle to deal with our own psyche, especially in times of great stress. History substantiates this claim. Some stressful events can sometimes lead to mass psychosis epidemics, a large portion of society becoming out of touch with reality, for example, those European and American witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries and the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century in which people descend to a lower moral and intellectual level as they succumb to overwhelming fear. While drug taking or other physical causes can also produce such madness, psychological causes, negative emotions, that drive individuals into a state of panic, have been a prime cause of people seeking relief from their anxiety by reordering their world view, by following the great leader or by fabricating false claims of guilt on some innocent group or entity.

Silvane Ariete identifies stages in Schizophrenia in which an initial anxiety phase leads to a later psychotic insight that explains the anxiety. The sufferer loses contact with reality but experiences a feeling of relief. Likewise a population of weakened and vulnerable individuals, driven by some real, imagined, or fabricated state of fear, will react in a similar way, based on a particular infected society’s perceived panic situation.

Joost Meerloo argues that in the case of totalitarian societies objectified populations are the victims of State power, becoming dependent subjects of rulers elevated to a deified status (like Stalin or Mao Tse tung) while the masses regress to a more child like state in a transformation of human nature. Dr Meerloo calls this corruption of the mind by imposing thoughts the leaders wish to inculcate, Menticide. He finds this is brought about by priming a population first by fear, “The end is near, ‘ then following this with waves of escalating terror followed by calm that weaken minds. Only deluded leaders will think they are fit to assume this sort of control, the delusion that they have the wisdom and acumen to exert this amount of top down authority.

Confusion, contradictory reporting and propaganda misinformation heighten peoples’ descent into totalitarianism (George Orwell described this in 1984). In modern times untrue messaging has been enabled by television, smart phones, social media and internet algorithms. Dr Meerloo observes that we are now constantly bombarded with stimuli overload with no time to reflect or meditate and we also become isolated from normal interaction with those among us who could be a positive influence for sanity.

Endless propaganda streams turn individuals who are capable of rational thought into irrational beings beset by chaotic feelings. Those who would be tyrants can now offer a way out, at a price, the masses must now give up their freedom. Control of all aspects of life must now be ceded to the ruling class…all spontaneity and joy at an end. (See my 59th Edition – Karl Popper and George Soros and Plato’s Noble Lie.)

So we shouldn’t follow tyrants. But what about following those leaders who appear to genuinely desire our welfare? Well trouble is, they are no better at predicting future events than any collective of citizens they oversee, in fact, argues researcher Philip Tetlock, (and others before him) they are less so.

Nassim Taleb has written an iconoclastic book, The Black Swan, sometimes too iconoclastic for this serf, that argues persuasively that we humans are poor at predicting, that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost every change in our world, inventions that come as a surprise and change our world, even important events in our own personal lives that we did not foresee.

In Chapter 10 of The Black Swan – The Scandal of Prediction, Nassim Taleb cites psychologist Philip Tetlock’s study involving some three hundred specialists making up to 2, 700 predictions that revealed that ‘experts’ are no more likely to make correct predictions than the rest us… in fact less so. Experts, however, are prone to adopt post-hoc explanations of why they were mistaken, or worse still, fail to recognise that they had erred, and then often spin stories about their false predictions. It pays to be sceptical.

Nassim Taleb quotes Yogi Berra, ‘The future ain’t what it used to be,’ and reminds us of two bird-stories that illustrate our human blindness to outliers in our environment. The first story is the unassailable belief, based on empirical evidence, that all swans are white, until the first sighting in Western Australia of a black swan! The second story recounts the positive experience of the farmyard turkey, until that deadly Thanksgiving Day experience, which came as a complete surprise to the trusting bird!

We live with uncertainty, but be not afeared. Following on from The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb wrote another book called Antifragile, a word which he says describes the opposite of fragile. Fragile things break when subject to stressors, antifragile things actually benefit from stressors. Stressors are information.

Taleb’s book deals with making decisions in an uncertain world, a world where the black swan domain is intractable, where what is non-measurable and non-predictable will remain so. Following the mathematician Poincarre, who identified the ‘three body problem,’ ‘Taleb asserts that ‘the limit is mathematical, period, there is no way round it on this planet.’ (Antifragile P 138.)

Wind extinguishes a candle and energises fire.

Summarizing Nassim Taleb’s non-meek attitude to uncertainty: ‘We just don’t just survive uncertainty, to just about make it. We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition – like a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics, have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.’ (A.P3.)

As you have to try to live in a labyrinth world that you don’t understand, Taleb says, you need to get yourself out of the fragile zone and into the antifragile zone. The antifragile benefits from shocks, so the trick is in seeking out options open to you in life that will benefit from shocks. Using a test of asymmetry, what has more upsides than downsides in options for action that you consider?

Things that have withstood shocks over time, evolution in Nature, cultures, growth of cities, technical innovations even good cooking recipes, depend on tinkering, trial and error. Trial and error is useful in giving you information while you keep your errors small, avoiding those Five and Ten Year Plans so beloved of bureaucracy and which are likely to meet with black swan surprises.

The antifragile loves a certain class of errors, observes Taleb.’ Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them – and do them well.’ We are better doers than thinkers.

As in Nature, where complex, systems are full of dependencies, our man-made complex systems, too, tend to create runaway chains of reactions that defy predictability and cause large effects which are sometimes falsely called ‘progress.’ The world does not function on program designs based on principles akin to teaching birds how to fly. This is a tendency favoured by some in academia.

Taleb points out many examples of human discoveries that were not due to academic formula but instead, the academic formula arose from some antifragile discovery based on trial and error. A professor from Rudges – Phil Scranton showed that we had been building jet engines in an experimental manner without truly understanding the theory, well before academics produced the theory. Cybernetics too, supposedly invented by Norbert Weiner in 1948 existed in practice in the engineering world prior to this.

Back in time, Villard de Honnecourt documents in notebooks that those medieval builders of cathedrals still standing today, did so by use of rule of thumb heuristics, in an age when no more than five people in the whole of Europe knew how to perform division arithmetic. (A. P222.) And think of that trial and error tinkering of the Industrial Revolution!

In addition to approaching situations by trial and error and being sceptical of authority’s messaging, Taleb recommends the Roman philosopher, Lucius Seneca’s non-meek stoicism as a way to face both adversity and good fortune in life.

Nassim Taleb wrote Antifragile before recent woke politics and trigger warnings became the fashion. For many today, Taleb’s recommendation of taking personal control of your emotions in the face of adversity would not be regarded as an option, better to regard yourself as a victim.

Taleb places the antifragile in a triad of Fragile – Robust- Antifragile – and argues that ordinary stoicism emphasising indifference to one’s fate focuses only on the downside in life, it is robust but not antifragile. Seneca uses a different approach. Seneca was a wealthy man and chose to keep his wealth but not let fear of its loss make him fragile. He combated psychological anxiety by practising daily exercise to mentally write off his possessions, so that when losses occurred he would be indifferent to loss, – similar to buying an insurance contract

Seneca domesticated his emotions, rather than try to eliminate them, as in the more passive type of stoicism. He proposed a complete training program so as to use his emotions more effectively, including waiting a day before responding to anger. He also used a cost benefit approach, advocating investing in good actions, – some things can be taken away from us but not the good deeds we do. He tried to reduce the downside and keep the upside.

‘My idea of the modern stoic sage,’ says Taleb , ‘ is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.’ (A. P156.)

Nassim Taleb investigates other options that provide us with more upside than downside, including good diet and exercise in place of over use of Big Pharma drugs, which I won’t go into it here, though some of it is fun reading.

Speaking of fun, here’s something else that I consider makes us antifragile or at least robust, and that is laughter.

The Divine Comedy…

In the 1986 film, The Name of the Rose, set in a 14th century monastery in northern Italy, there’s an interchange between two monks, a narrow dogmatist, The Venerable Jorgis, who discourages laughter in the monastery, and visitor to the monastery, William of Baskerville, who is more curious, wears roughly fashioned spectacle to read, and studies astronomy.

When William defends laughter, saying that laughter is particular only to man, Jorgis chastises him, declaring:

‘That laughter is proper to man is a sign of our limitations, sinners that we are. Laughter, for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God.’

Here it is again, compliance through fear, those who desire to be obeyed know to instil fear. So what about laughter as particular to man, as William of Baskerville observed? Well chimps and other apes show an incipient laughter when at play but laughter specifically evolved in us, it is a uniquely human behaviour. That it has been a human reaction from our early days suggests it serves a survival purpose. So what may that be?

Henri Bergson argues in an essay, Laughter : An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, that we laugh at what is rigid, mechanical or mistaken in human behaviour, when someone doesn’t demonstrate enough attentiveness to the world around them. A man running along the street stumbles and falls; the passers by can’t help laughing. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary … he wasn’t paying attention Says Bergson:

‘The victim of a practical joke is in a position similar to that of a runner who falls – he is comic for the same reason… The laughable element in both cases consists of a certain MECHANICAL INELASTICITY just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being.(See my 19th Edition Serf Under_ground Journal. The Divine Comedy.)

Bergson makes insightful comments on how this works in comic literature and film, he identifies a cannon of comic characters deficient in self awareness, who act in prescribed ways, the miser, the misanthrope and other generic types. Jane Austin classic characters Like Mr Collins and Mrs Elton demonstrate similar prescribed behaviour.

In life, movement never halts but is ever-changing. In comedy, movement becomes gesture. The more unconsciously the gesture is repeated, the more puppet-like, the more striking the comic effect. Hence cartoons.

The comic in language lays stress on lapses in attention in language itself, Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde word games do this, or transpose the natural expression of something into another key, make large things small. Chaucer does this with his with barnyard animals conversing on serious themes, or small things large, as in The Rape of the Lock. Lots of errors via language to make us laugh.

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So in conclusion…folks, be not afeared. Go on walking tours, avail yourself of the comic, laugh at the rigid ways of comic characters, enjoy the films of Mel Brookes, Jacques Tatis, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, (not Karl.) And learn to laugh at yourself and others,- (taking advice from Jane Austin.) Finally, do – not – take – too – seriously – the – pronouncements – of – government – or – medja, they have their own agendas. As witty commenter kim at Judith Curry’s climate science blog once said,’ Wage, wage war against the lying and the fright.’

74th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

A Serf’s Discourse on Human Nature.

Remember that scene in Hitchcock’s film The Birds where a hysterical woman accosts the stranger in the group with the accusing words , “Who are you – What are you?” and all eyes in the service station cafe focus suspiciously on the stranger, Tiki Hendrickson. Well turns out she’s not some mysterious bringer of disaster to quiet little Bodega Bay. What we see is scapegoating in action, a group of insiders blaming an outsider for some perceived disaster being inflicted on the group.

There’s an anthropologist cum philosopher called Rene Girard who perceived scapegoating as integral to human culture, even as the basis of human societies. He makes a large claim.

J’accuse…or someone does.

Girard says we learn by imitating others, imitation eventually erases the differences among human beings, and as we become similar to each other we begin to desire the same things, a process he calls Mimesis, which leads to rivalries and a Hobbesian war of all against all. These mimetic rivalries soon threaten the very existence of communities. What to do? Girard says this is where the scapegoat comes in. Peace comes at the price of an identified victim viewed by the community as the actual cause of the turmoil, someone or group to be punished, expelled or even killed by the community. Once this retributive violence occurs, peace is restored, – at least for now. In past times this scapegoat could take the magical form of a god, a demon or a witch, the essential thing was that the community itself was not to blame, the victim and the process was turned into myth and ritual celebrating a peaceful outcome.

While Girard’s large claim cannot be validated or even falsified, pre-history evidence being light on the ground, we do know that humans imitate each other, cultural habits, fashions in dress, crazes like the Tulip Mania are features of everyday life. We also know that humans are prone to scapegoat others, particularly those perceived as not of the group, violent instances, the witch trials and punishments of Medieval and 17th and 18th century Europe, the pogroms against Jews in Germany in World War 11.

Attacking others, especially those not of the group, that’s not especially a human trait though. Take some animal groups, apes, lion prides, territorial birds, observe how one group attack outsiders that venture into their territory! Until recently life on the edge was the way of life for most people also, a shortage of resources characterizing much of human history, a struggle at the water hole or some land resource in short supply -it’s the story of human as well as animal existence.

So what else does Girard’s theory tell us about human behaviour? Well, it tells us we’re theorists, it’s yet another example of our human disposition to theorize about our natural world and living inhabitants of that world, including us and the societies we have constructed. Uniquely human is the development of spoken and written language beyond emotive expression and signal, descriptive and critical language based on grammar and logic (and evidence); pity we don’t always adhere to logic and evidence when we argue our case.

That old chestnut, nature versus nurture.

Here’s the standard model theory, very much nurture not nature, Skinner’s behaviourist theory first propounded by John Locke and then by David Hume. It is the belief that we learn by habit, the child is the passive recipient of his or her culture, cultural transmission taking place through learning a well understood unitary process that makes the child like the adult of its culture. It’s a theory that implies that we’re open to perfectibility – Utopianists with creative urges like it, gurus who wish to control others also like it, more of that later.

The standard model has been under attack since the 1960’s beginning with the marine biologist George Williams and geneticist William Hamilton. Their revolution is best known by Richard Dawkin’s book ‘The Selfish Gene,’ at its core is the recognition that individuals do not act consistently to benefit family or a group or even themselves, Individuals are driven by their genes because they are all descended from others who did the same, Dawkins says we are survival machines programmed to preserve our selfish molecules known as genes. Dawkins says it is not the individual who survives at the level of evolution but the gene. What he named the ‘selfish’ gene could also be called the ‘immortal ‘gene. Recent research has not undermined his theory.

A past student of Richard Dawkins. the evolutionary biologist Matt Ridley expands on the gene theory. Selfish as we are, he asks, why, then, are people such eager co-operators? In his book ‘ The Origins of Virtue ‘, instead of focusing on diversity in human cultures as the behaviourists do, Matt Ridley studies where our cultures share a practice or engage in universal behaviour, behaviour not shared by other animal species.

Ridley identifies networks of trade and commerce as common practice in all human societies, even in existing hunter gatherer groups such as the Yir Yoront aboriginal tribe on the York Peninsular in Australia. The Yir Yoront used polished stone axes with wooden handles that were highly valued and in constant use. The stone axes were made by a tribe that lived some 400 miles away at the site of stone quarries that supplied stone for the axes. In exchange the Yir Yoront traded barbed sting-ray spears that were made by their tribe. The two tribes conducted this trade by a system of arbitrage involving other tribes whose territories lay in between the two producer’s territories. The Yir Yoront could buy one stone axe from a near neighbour for a dozen spears. As the spears worked their way further south their value rose relative to that of stone axes. In this trade the producers benefited and so did those middlemen in between.

This exchange illustrates two things, says Ridley. Trade illustrates the division of labour as a human activity, (though some social animals have some division of labour within a group they don’t have it inter group,) and it demonstrates that trade is not just a modern phenomenon but was part of hunter gatherer life. Ridley also describes how the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, studying the belligerent Yanomamo tribe in Venezuela, observed that they appear to deliberately manufacture products that were provided for allies in order to strengthen alliances via feasting ceremonies, cementing bonds that could be valuable in times of war.

The blank slate and other theories of human nature…

Neuroscientist Steven Pinker adds to the discussion of human nature in his essay ‘The Blank Slate,’ in which he gives a comprehensive view of various theories of human nature that have had currency in Western societies, including the theory of his title. The first theory he refers to is the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, much of which we allocate to psychology and biology today- positing that the human mind has a capacity for love, for a sense of morality and a capacity for choice or free will; and grounded in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, also has a tendency towards sin. Today no scientifically aware individual can accept a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible and tends to look elsewhere for a theory of human nature though it may include components of the Judeo-Christian theory.

Steven Pinker identifies three popular theories that took its place or added to it at various times. The first of these, by Frenchman Rene Descartes in the 17th century, began with his sceptical search for intellectual firm ground, “I think therefore I am.” He concluded his thought process with the view that the human mind was quite separate and distinct from the human body. Descartes’ theory has enjoyed great appeal with many individuals as re-enforcing the Judeo-Christian belief in the possibility of existence of a human soul separate from and surviving the death of the body. It was ridiculed in the 20th century as ‘the doctrine of the ghost in the machine,’ by the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle.

Another theory that has survived despite anthropological findings that show otherwise is the doctrine of The Noble Savage, most commonly associated with the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who wrote: ‘So many authors have hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel and requires a regular system of police to be reclaimed, whereas nothing can be more gentle than him in his primitive state…’ By other authors Rousseau was referring particularly to Thomas Hobbes saying life without rule of law was nasty, brutish and short. Unfortunately close encounters with other tribal societies, for example in the South Pacific, by naturalists and anthropologists have indicated that Rousseau’s theory was more romantic than actual. And when it comes to rule of law, history has shown the need for checks and balances to prevent governing individuals and group from ravaging their flocks. The American founding fathers understood this with their efforts to establish such checks and balances in the American Constitution.

The third theory was John Locke’s doctrine of the mind as being like white paper, ‘void of ideas which are acquired later from experience.’ which was shared by the philosopher David Hume who in his ‘Treatize on Human Nature,’ written in the 1730’s famously ascribed our attempts at identifying causes to events as no more than blind habit. This is the Blank Slate Theory which continued to be influential through the 20th century, explaining all human behaviour by simple mechanisms of association and conditioning.

From his work as a cognitive scientist, Pinker agrees with Ridley that a bed rock of universal predispositions, ways of thinking and feeling, identified in ethnography studies, have to be in place in order that things get done. They include the basic concepts of an enduring object and lawful causation, which can be seen even in young infants, a number sense that enables us to grasp quantity of number, spatial recognitions that allow us to negotiate the world, facial recognitions and a theory of mind with which we seek to understand the behaviour of other people. And of course, there’s our language instinct that enables us to communicate our thoughts and feelings to others through words and sentences.

Pinker says that neuroscience has also challenged the blank slate by showing ‘that there’s a complex genetic patterning to the brain, an example being the wiring diagram of the primate visual system comprising some fifty distinct areas connected in precise ways’. Neuroscience studies also identify common patterns in the brains of fraternal and especially identical twins. There are those studies of identical twins separated at birth, sometimes even by nation, who meeting as adults, show idiosyncratic resemblances in behaviour, too many to be accidental.

Pinker also argues that in keeping with Darwinian evolution, evolutionary psychology has also challenged the blank slate in another way by showing that many human drives that don’t maximize our welfare, such as our human thirst for revenge, all those vendettas and wars, can be interpreted as adaptations to survival in our ancestral environment where a reputation for toughness was an advantage in a world where you couldn’t dial up emergency for assistance.

It’s hard to be objective when we think about the human brain. We like to think we have rationality and morality and free will. Proponents of the blank slate think that biologists’ genetic claims are a threat to these things. Pinker gives four reasons why behaviourists are emotionally committed to the blank slate doctrine. They consider that it supports the view that we are all equal and it supports the view that we are perfectible. It also dispels their fear of determinism and fear of nihilism.

Relating to the fear of inequality, Pinker says it’s a non sequitur argument. ‘It confuses the value of fairness with the claim of sameness. When the Declaration of Independence stated: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal,’ it surely did not mean ‘We hold these truths as self evident that all men are clones.’ Rather a commitment to political equality means two things. First it rests on a theory of human nature, ‘says Pinker, ‘in particular, universal human interests, as when the Declaration continues by saying that ‘people are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ It’s also a commitment to prohibit public discrimination against individuals based on the average of certain groups they belong to, such as race, ethnicity, or sex. ‘

There’s a downside in believing the blank slate, says Pinker, in that you view talented and successful people as invariably recipients of ill-gotten gains such as the Jews in Europe or the Chinese in Indonesia. This can lead to persecutions or expulsions and sometimes to genocide. The second fear Pinker identifies, the fear of imperfectability, well there’s a dash to an old dream. If ignoble traits are innate, what can anyone do? All is not lost, argues Pinker, the human mind is a complex system of many parts, some of which can and do counteract other impulses. The executive system of the frontal lobes of our brains can apply knowledge about consequences and moral values to inhibit behaviour. (Matt Ridley has argued how all societies are critical of selfish behaviour.)

Then there are our cognitive faculties that allow us to learn lessons from history. And here again there’s a downside to this desire to mould human nature. It’s a temptation to social engineering. Some autocrats of the 20th century, like Chairman Mao, believed in the blank slate.

All is not jest blind fate.

Next Pinker explores our fear of determinism. He doesn’t say much on free will but does observe that parts of the brain can anticipate the consequences of behaviour and inhibit it accordingly. I expand on this with some observations on determinism and rationality by others here in a previous issue.

Pinker’s final defence is directed against the behaviourist fear of nihilism, and the fear that biology strips life of learning and purpose. Pinker wisely reminds us that meaning in life does not require that the products of evolution, namely ourselves, must be selfish, or immoral or be without purpose, even if in some metaphorical sense our genes are selfish and evolution amoral and without a purpose other than passing on genes. We can adopt our own purposes. The realisation that life is short can act as an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in some pointless dispute, to vow to use your time productively instead of squandering it.’ The gene theory does not preclude human choice.

I’ll add to that our by noting how our species have evolved to be creative in so many ways…. building bridges, roads and aquaducts, making breakthroughs in science that have saved lives, and via spoken and written language that we ourselves created, have produced great literature. Our species have also composed inspiring music – orchestral symphonies and concertos, along with simple folk songs, and devised the musical instruments to play them. We’re not all bad!

What about rationality?

Philosopher David Hume, that most rational of men, said that our thinking based on accumulated perceptions is merely blind habit, that although we have experienced all those instances that the sun has risen doesn’t logically allow us to say that it must rise tomorrow. This is like the turkey experiencing the farmer’s kindness right up to Thanksgiving Day when the turkey experiences otherwise.

Professor of Science, Karl Popper, in a series of essays and lectures published as ‘Öbjective Knowledge. An Evolutionary Approach.’ claims that while Hume’s argument concerning habit is logically valid, it is based on an incorrect theory of human thinking, the theory that we are inductive learners. This theory of inductive learning is what he calls ‘the bucket theory’, whereas Popper argues that we are not passive receivers of experience but active learners in what he calls ‘the searchlight theory ‘ of learning, learning by way of trial and error observations.

‘We have perceptions,’ says Popper, ‘but we make observations,’ which is a different kind of process. An observation always presupposes the existence of some system of expectation, it is always preceded by a particular interest, a question or a problem. Popper says that a disposition to act must proceed every perception. As Frederic Neitzche observed, ‘No such thing as the innocent eye.’

And quoting Karl Popper again: ‘At every instant of our pre-scientific or scientific development we are living in the centre of ‘a horizon of expectations,’ whether subconscious or conscious, or perhaps even explicitly stated in some language. Animals or babies have also their various horizons of expectations though no doubt on a lower level of consciousness than, say, a scientist, whose horizon of expectations consist to a considerable extent of linguistically formulated theories or hypotheses.’ (P345.)

When a baby puts an object from the floor in its mouth, it is testing a hypotheses, ”Is this part of my food environment?’ just as when a scientist poses a specific question of nature and follows it up with more careful observations. Richard Feynman’s “First you guess, then you test.’

The various horizons of expectation differ among animals and among individual humans, whether at subconscious or conscious levels. An example, is when we encounter an unexpected step in our path. It is the unexpectedness of the step which makes us conscious of the fact that we expected to encounter an even path. Such disappointments force us to correct our system of expectations.

In all cases, Popper argues, the horizon of expectations plays the part of a frame of reference conferring meaning or significance on our experiences our actions and observations. The observations we make have a peculiar function within this frame. If they clash with our expectations, they may, under certain circumstances, destroy the frame itself and force us to rebuild a whole horizon of expectation. Today’s science, for example is built upon yesterday’s science which may be subject to falsification.

Thinking fast and slo-o-w.

Antonio Damasio in ‘Descartes Error’ replaces the frame of reference with emotional engagement as a dynamic for action, though I think these are connected. Damasio argues, in his case study of broken brains, that emotions are a mental device for gaining commitment. This study includes studying the brain cast and history of Phineas Gage, a famous 19th century case of a survivor of a mining explosion in which a steel pole pierced Phineas Gage’s frontal cortex. Afterwards he remained completely rational but was unable to make choices between the array of possibilities that presented even in simple decisions. Other cases that Damasio worked with, patients who had injuries in the same brain area, presented the same behaviour and declared that they had lost the ability to feel emotion. His patients became so cold blooded about rationally weighing up all the facts before them that they couldn’t make up their minds, no particular course of action appealed to them. ‘Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behaviour’, speculates Damasio.

Thinking fast and slow… Not enough careful deliberation, argues Daniel Kahneman in his book about human cognitive illusions, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow.’ Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist who turned psychology into a quantitative investigation, A large part of his book is made up of studies indicating the various illusions which supposedly rational people demonstrate when confronted with choices under controlled conditions.

Kahneman argues the existence in our brains of two independent systems for organizing knowledge, one he labels System One, a fight or flight survival mechanism which probably evolved with our mammalian ancestors. Our System Two is the slow process of forming judgements based on conscious thinking that checks the actions of System One and allows us to correct our mistakes. Human art and science have been created by System Two.

Says Kahneman, bottom line, we’re machines for jumping to conclusions, prone to associative bias. For System One, the measure of success is coherence of a story, it’s consistency that matters most, not completeness of evidence… ‘what you see is all that there is.’ There’s a grab-bag of simple heuristics we adopt to make adequate but often wrong answers to difficult questions like ‘the availability heuristic, what comes readily from memory, first in line. And the bad news is, as Kahneman first discovered, working with Israeli Defence Forces in the 1950’s, that your System Two thinkers are also prone to similar thinking errors and heuristics, more apologist than critical of the emotions of System One.

I don’t see this contradicting Damasio, but what about Popper’s theory of trial and error rationality?

Well, thinking is hard work and time consuming so when you don’t consider that your decision is too fraught you are prone to not check your guess too stringently, it seems, confirmation bias rules. If you have a strong cultural or political frame, then you don’t want to challenge it too much, your expectations have to be truly shaken by some test observation to be critically roused, – but it happens and you may have to rebuild your whole framework of expectations. There are some people, not only Socrates, who are viewed as generally rational and sceptical, and there are some scientists who really do subscribe to the scientific method, particularly if they are curious and really wish to understand the question they ask of nature. Some so called scientists who do science as a high status and well paid enterprise may be more tempted to confirm the research outcome they’re financed to find. But we can be rational as individuals. The TV program Áircrash Investigations shows how people apply trial and error to solve urgent problem situations. The aircraft companies must be seen to solve these crashes, people want to know that the aircraft company is safe or the business loses customers. They can’t fake it. Watch the program and you see how logically and exhaustively the investigators test the possible causes of the crash, aircraft, pilot error, control tower mistakes…

All the way with Edward Bernays…

So further to rationality, back to the gurus I mentioned earlier, those like Dr Edward Bernays who’s aim was to mould human opinion or as he termed it, ‘to engineer consent.’ Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, wrote in his book ‘Propaganda, (1928) ‘ If we understand the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will, without them knowing about it?’ In the techniques he employed in his career in public relations this is what he did, engineer consent.

When he started working for American Tobacco Company, Bernays was given the objective of increasing Lucky Strike sales among women, who for the most part had formerly avoided smoking. The first strategy was to persuade women to smoke cigarettes instead of eating. Bernays began using photographers, artists, newspapers, and magazines to promote the special beauty of thin women. Medical authorities were found to promote the choice of cigarettes over sweets. Home-makers were cautioned that keeping cigarettes on hand was a social necessity. The campaign was a success but a taboo remained on women smoking in public. Tying the smoking campaign to the women’s freedom movement Bernays organized a contingent of attractive women to smoke cigarettes, ‘torches of freedom,’ in the 1928 New York Easter Parade. The carefully scripted event was a publicity success and women across the country were soon smoking as planned.

A chilling program of indoctrination that might sound like passive conditioning, but wait a minute, weren’t those women willing participants in Bernays’ program of indoctrination? They’re responding because glamour and sexual attractiveness is important to them, they’re not just innocent victims – though he did set up a clever plan.

It works like Pavlov conditioning, Pavlov’s dog is not just passively responding to the ringing of the bell that signals food, it’s anticipating food, which is part of its active daily food seeking behaviour. The dog has innate expectations, Popper’s horizon of expectations.

That Unconstrained Vision Thing.

Relating to persuasion, the economist and intellectual historian, Thomas Sowell has formulated his own theory of human nature in Western Society. Sowell has written a book called ‘A Conflict of Visions ‘ (1987) in which he observes us as belonging to two fundamentally different groups depending on our views of human nature, these two visions Thomas Sowell calls ‘the constrained vision’ and ‘the unconstrained vision.’ Thomas Sowell says these two fundamentally different visions underlie Western Civilization and can be retraced back to Karl Popper’s analysis of Plato and his vision for a Republic in 6th century BC Athens.

The constrained vision is, that while individuals may differ in many ways, human nature is basically fixed and flawed, a problem that has to be considered in the evolution of human institutions and laws, implying prudent trial and error reform rather than grand schemes for social change. Adam Smith was a proponent of this view.

The unconstrained vision sees human nature as perfectible, ‘born free but everywhere in chains,’ as Rousseau stated. If humanity experiences pain and suffering, it is because of a failure of others to be as wise as those who are of the unconstrained vision, present institutions and leaders are the cause of human pain and wrongdoing, whereas the unconstrained can remedy this.

These two visions, sometimes presented as implicit views, sometimes unconscious assumptions, have directed actual and would-be decision makers through out history,
The individual framers of the American Constitution following the constrained vision, proposed checks and balances, separation of powers between Legislature, Executive and Judiciary on grounds that concentration of powers by a single person or small group is a threat to the liberty of others. According to Sowell, the French liberal the Marquise de Condorcet, demonstrating the unconstrained vision, supporter of the French Revolution, after being arrested by Robespierre, was still puzzling why the American makers of their Constitution needed such checks and balances.

In a contemporary situation these conflicts of vision are still strong as in the McCain /Obama battle for the US Presidency and attitudes to law. McCain shared the opinion of Oliver Wendell Holmes no one has the sheer intellectual power to decide to figure it all out in advance, that the judiciary role be limited to making judgments according to the laws, not making laws according to their own opinion, which is not law but an arbitrary act. Obama said with regard to selecting judges, not that they would make decisions according to laws that are the result of peoples’ experience over time but rather, ‘If a woman is out trying to support her family and is being treated unfairly, then the Court has to stand up if nobody else will, and that’s the kind of judge I want.’
Sounds brave but as Sowell says, that is no law at all, it overturns the rule of law with one man’s arbitrary decision.

Thomas Sowell also observes that the constrained and unconstrained visions have different ways of looking at war throughout history. One is unsurprised by war, war doesn’t need explaining. This relates also to Geoffrey Blainey’s view in his book ‘The Causes of War.’ In most countries there were just as many or more periods of war in each century as of peace, so what needs explaining, perhaps, are the causes of peace. Sowell argues that the unconstrained view of war as an event arising from some kind of misunderstanding is unhistorical and somewhat unintellectual. He says that well-meaning intellectuals in the 1930’s responsible for leading public opinion in favour of disarmament while Hitler was building up his military machine, helped bring on WorldWar11. People like them, argues Sowell, predominantly able in their own academic field think it gives them the knowledge to change the world, whereas they haven’t had this experience, they go well beyond their competency trying to create a Utopia. .

And as is clearly apparent with theories of economic development, the constrained vision supports bottom up management, a million people knowing their own interests, whereas the unconstrained visionary supports top-down management and strong central government. You know which one serfs’ support…

Let the bard have the last word.

Just in conclusion, can’t exclude that master of human action, Master Shakespeare himself, creating characters in relation to two literary traditions, the comic vision and the tragic vision. Essentially the characters in Shakespeare’s drama are exceptionally active. In the comedy ‘As You Like It,’ we see the wise and witty Rosalind donning male attire to take a role in her survival in the Arden Forest and later using her disguised role to school the romantic Orlando for adult life and marriage, she’s taking intelligent steps for her own and his future. All’s Well That Ends Well.

In his four great tragedies, ‘Hamlet,’ ‘King Lear,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Othello’ we see the four tragic heroes bringing on their own disasters because of some tragic flaw in their characters that proves fateful in a particular situation.

There’s Othello, his character disintegrating from jealousy, his problem, we discover that his initial image is based on false confidence, beneath the surface, there are deep uncertainties of which he was unaware. Come along a nihilist motivated by malice, like Iago ,and Othello is easily persuaded that his wife is unfaithful to him. Then there’s Lear, all passionate intensity and unrealistic expectations that his daughters will respond in kind, and his opposite, the coldly intelligent and villainous Edmund, whom we witness reflecting on his own character in a way we’ve scarcely seen in literature before Shakespeare but which is now something we take for granted in the modern novel… and in ourselves.

In the play, Macbeth, in Act 5 Scene 3, we hear Macbeth thinking aloud. Initially he made a mistake when he thought he was too extraordinary to be confined by other men’s morality, too late he finds out he was wrong:

‘I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
Í must not look to have;’

For the introspective Hamlet, who like Phineus Gage, is unable to compel himself to meaningful action, Shakespeare developed the dramatic device of the soliloquy to allow his brilliant character to reflect aloud on stage and be overheard by his audience.

So in conclusion, while no one has likely come across characters in real life as charismatic and powerful as Shakespeare’s tragic figures, we recognise in them, representatives of actual human traits and behaviours, the hubris, the human tendency to exploit our positions of power to control others and the ability to fool oneself- until nature ‘s reality intervenes, our innate ability to make heaven and hell on earth. Shakespeare creatively portrayed this complexity in language that, if equalled by some, has never been surpassed. As the literary critic, Harold Bloom says of Shakespeare, he was your master of cognitive acuity and its representation in the Arts. The Arts, something unique to human originality.

73rd EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

Those Cheshire Sunspots,

they come and go, come and go …

Tenniel.

There’s a technical report by Professor Emeritus and Civil Engineer, W.J.R. Alexander on drought and flood periods in South Africa, “A critical assessment of current climate change science.” that I consider merits serious study. The report is not copyright and may be distributed in full with attribution, as I intend to do here. The report was readily available to me on the internet when I made a hard copy of it for my files, round about 2011, however, since then it is no longer easily available. Professor Alexander has deep experience in his field of study and his findings should not go missing. I’m resurrecting the full copy for you so that it won’t be lost like the manuscripts of the Alexandria Library, destroyed almost two thousand years ago. At heart I am a librarian.

Professor Alexander had a long career in water resource development and flood studies in South Africa, beginning with a B.SC degree in what was then called the Department of Irrigation, later the Department of Water Affairs. He spent the next twenty years in the field, building dams, canals and pipelines and tunnels, including the 82 km long Orange -Fish Tunnel, which was the longest tunnel in the world. In 1970 he became Chief of the Division of Hydrology, collecting and publishing the hydrological data necessary for water resource development and management in a water -scarce country. He was also responsible for design of structures exposed to flood damage so a major challenge was the search for multi-year river flow prediction capabilities. He cites among his qualifications, Professor Emeritus, Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering, University of Pretoria, Honorary Fellow, South African Institution of Civil Engineering and Member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters.

There’s a long history of describing disaster…

Behold, there came seven years of great plenty throughout the land of Egypt – and there shall arise after them seven years of famine. Genesis 41, 29-30.

Professor Alexander quotes this biblical prophecy in a sort of preface to his Report to illustrate the problem of periodic changes in river flow, not only in Egypt, which had the first water level gauging structure built on Rodda island in 641 A.D. to measure river flow on the River Nile, but for South Africa in modern times, where measuring drought and river flooding water levels are a concern in the construction of stable storage to conserve water on the subcontinent.

In the Report’s introduction, Professor Alexander states that his conclusions are ‘solidly based on observation theory applied to a wealth of climate related data using methods that are daily in use by civil engineers and in the applied sciences.’ ( Report, 2006.W.J.R Alexander, p5.) He later contrasts his methodology with the theoretical study of complex atmospheric and oceanic processes by climate scientists, which he says ‘are little more than untested hypotheses in the absence of statistically verifiable confirmation.’ (2006 p8.) Every storage dam on a river is based on an analysis of recorded data. ‘Process theory,’ says Alexander on page 17 of his Report, ‘ which is the study of the processes that produce the rainfall and therefore the river flow, ‘does not feature in the design of these structures anywhere in the world, from the ancient civilisations through to the present day.- In contrast climatology is a young science, and is based on abstract process theory supported by limited measurements.’

In the beginning of Alexander’s Report of 2006 he cites three men who commented on the anomaly existing in South African, and other river data, the famous astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer and civil engineers, R.E. Hutchins and H.E Hurst. Their views give historical perspective to the study. Re Norman Lockyer:

‘At the beginning of the century, the famous astronomer, Sir Norman Lockyer wrote that one of the foremost achievements of the new century would be to forecast well in advance the incidence of famine in India or drought in Australia by means of analysis of sunspot spectra.’ (From the report of the Commission of Enquiry into Water Matters, 1970.) (In Alex Intro to 2006.)

R.E Hutchins was one of a generation of scientists and civil engineers who served in the British Colonial Office in India and then migrated to South Africa. He was stationed in Mysore, when 1.5 million people starved to death in a severe drought He came to South Africa in 1883 to continue research he had begun in India investigating predictable linkages between droughts and sunspot numbers. He studied documents and had discussions with others who had observed that droughts were often broken at eleven-year intervals by floods that occurred in 1822, 1841, 1863, 1874 and 1885 coincident with sunspot maxima In his book, ‘Cycles of drought and good seasons in South Africa,’ he wrote:

‘Many sunspots: good rain and cheap grain,. Few sunspots: bad rains and dear grain.

What that correspondence is can be seen at a glance by inspecting the sunspot curve and the rainfall curve [in the diagram] The yellow curve rising steeply to a maximum and then falling away gradually to a minimum is the sunspot curve – a curve which ought to be graven on the mind of every man and woman in South Africa.’ (In Alex.2006, p9)

In 1950 the civil engineer H.E. Hurst analysed 1080 years of data from the Rodda Nilometer in Egypt recorded during the era 641 to 1946, which he intended using to determine the required storage capacity of the proposed new Aswan High Dam. He found an unexplained anomaly from wet to dry cycles in the records then analysed other long geophysical records such as sediment deposits, temperature, rainfall and sunspots/price of wheat data in which he found the same anomaly concerning periods of high values data and periods of low values data that do not vary randomly. This anomaly became known as the Hurst phenomenon, or Hurst’s Ghost.

‘It is now obvious,’ says Alexander, ‘that the anomalies observed by Hutchins in the 1880’s and Hurst 70 years later are directly related to climate perturbations. If these are regular occurrences, they should be predictable .’ (Alex. P9.)

In the 1970’s, hydrologists in the South African Department of Water Affairs encountered the problem observed by Hurst in Egypt, there were many periods where restrictions had to be imposed on the water supply of the Vaal and other South African rivers. A team of hydrologists led by Alexander was gathered to examine prior assumptions relating to river flow. Graphical analysis, beginning with the 1913 cycle showed there was a clear 20 year (later 21 year) periodicity in the data and that this was the cause of the difficulty with studying the data as a series of roughly 10 year sunspot cycles. Alternating cycles are identified by assigned negative values in Alexander’s research which showed the sunspot numbers per cycle as +442, -410, +605, -757, +950, -705, +829 and –785.

Alexander observed that: ‘The average numbers of sunspots in the alternate cycles that make up the double cycles were +706 and –664, demonstrating a meaningful difference in sunspot activity in the alternating cycles. As will be seen, the alternating sunspot cycles have appreciably different effects on the hydro-meteorological processes. It will later be demonstrated that it is not the annual sunspot densities that are important in identifying the relationship, but the rate of change in the densities. This is not apparent in the conventional graphs of the sunspot cycles where all numbers have positive values.’ (A. p19)

Alexander found: ‘The graphs showed that there was a clear pattern in the accumulated departures from the record mean values and these were approximately synchronous with sunspot activity. These were quite different from random deviations.’ (Ibid p16.) The findings were published in South Africa in 1978 ‘Long range prediction of river flow – a preliminary assessment.’

Alexander’s research continued and published in the South African Journal of Science, 1995, in which he detailed his analytical methods and said: ‘The acid test that will demonstrate whether or not the 20 year periodicity continues is at hand. If the drought is broken by widespread rainfall during the next two years it will surely be conclusive.’ (P16) Four months after publication, severe floods occurred in South Africa.

Alexander says that he was also the first to report a sustained increase in the rainfall of South Africa based on his studies.

Methodology.

All of Alexanders study is based on a wealth of official date, ( apart from the Southern Oscillation index and Zambesi River Flow Data.) this includes hydrological data from The South African Weather Service and Department of Water Affairs and Forestry and the World Data Centre for the Sunspot Index, beginning with the sunspot minimum that began in June, 1913 and ending with the sunspot minimum of March, 1996.

The methodology emphasised arithmetical and graphical interpretations rather than mathematical interpretations. The reasons, Professor Alexander claimed, were to avoid harmonic and spectral analysis which could introduce oscillatory behaviour that is not present in the data and also suppress the important, sudden changes that are present in hydro-meteorological time series.

What Professor Alexander found through his data investigation was # a strong positive correlation between sunspot incidence and river flow which are not random events. # He identified the presence of a twenty year periodicity in the hydro-meteorological data composed of two ten- year cycles, the first stronger than the second, and# a biblical ‘Joseph Effect’ in the data of approximately seven years dry followed by seven years wet periodicity.

The following are figures and tables Professor Alexander presents in his Report and his own words describing and analysing these graphics I begin with Figure 1 on page 23 of the Report:

From The Report.

Figure 1. Comparisons of the characteristics of annual sunspot numbers with corresponding characteristics of the annual flows in the Vaal River.

Alexander says:
‘A reference datum value of–200 was used in the sunspot data in order to accommodate the negative values. This has no effect on the interpretations. The top panels are the conventional dimensionless histograms, where all values are expressed as multiples of the record mean values. While the cyclicity is apparent in the sunspot panel it is not recognisable in the river flow. The river flow histogram shows the high degree of asymmetry about the mean value with many more values less than the mean value than above it. This is typical of river flow data in dry climates.

The most informative graphical presentations are those in the second panels, which show the accumulated departures from the record mean values. These are obtained by subtracting the mean values (1.0) from each of the values in the histogram. Some of the values will be negative. These are accumulated one at a time and the sum plotted.

An increase in the accumulated departures of the sunspot numbers during the period of record is immediately apparent. The maximum negative departures occurred at the start of the 21-year periods, identified as (A), (C), (E) and (G).

The comparison with that of the flow in the Vaal River is very instructive. The reversals at points (A), (C), (E) and (G) are virtually identical with the corresponding reversals in the sunspot data. They occurred during the hydrological years beginning October 1933, 1954, 1974, and 1995. The rising limbs A-B, C-D and E-F are sequences of years where the inflows were greater than the mean value. The falling limbs B-C, D-E, and F-G are sequences where the inflows were less than the mean value.

Notice also the absence of 11-year periodicity in the correlogram of the Vaal River. It is no wonder that climate change scientists have been unable to detect synchronous relationships with the 11-year sunspot cycle. It does not exist! This is because the properties of the alternating solar cycles are fundamentally different to the extent that the climatic responses are also very different.’

‘There are several interesting features in this table. There is an almost three-fold, sudden increase in the annual flows in the Vaal River from the three previous years to the three subsequent years. This is directly associated with [an almost] six-fold increase in sunspot numbers. The second important point is the consistency in the range of sunspot numbers before and after the reversal. The totals for the three prior years varied between 25 and 60, and the totals of the three immediately subsequent years varied between 250 and 400. It is very clear that these are systematic changes associated with the sunspot minima, and are not random events.

This relationship exists despite the long and complex energy path starting at the Sun and ending in the river flow that enters Vaal Dam. The only residual energy is the potential energy, which is a function of the elevation of the water mass above sea-level. This residual energy has its origin in solar activity; followed by the arrival on the Earth’s atmosphere, continents and oceans; followed by the poleward movement of the energy through complex atmospheric and oceanic processes; followed by the systems that produce the rainfall; and finally by the complex rainfall-runoff processes. The survival of the periodic signals on its own demonstrates a strong and unequivocal relationship between variation in solar activity and the corresponding variation in climatic responses.’

Table 6 is a combination of the independent observations by Tyson (1987) and Bredenkamp (2000) each relating to different climatic processes and different analytical methodologies, and a comparison with sunspot cycles. The first and most important observation is the presence of alternating sequences of wet and dry years, and the corresponding alternating sequences of sunspot cycles. While the comparative years are not precise, there can be no doubt at all that a meaningful relationship exists with sunspot cyclicity.’ (Alexander P27.)

(Tyson  P.D.  Climate change an variability in Sth Africa Oxford Uni Press 1987.)

(Bredenkamp D.B.Groundwater monitoring. Water Research Commission Report  No. 838/1/0.)

Compare the length of the sequences of wet and dry years with the biblical seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. The ancient Egyptians were well aware of these alternating sequences in the annual flows of the life-giving Nile River.’ (Alexander. p28.)

To read Part 1 of Alexander’s Report, ‘ The Scientific Basis,’ in its entirety or the rest of the Report, the link is here…………….A critical assessment of current climate change science – W.J.R. Alexander. Part 2 of the Report, entitled ‘The Natural Environment,’ centres on Alexander’s findings that increase in global temperatures has increased rainfall and that climate science papers based on climate models have failed to take this fact into account. Alexander makes the argument on page 34 of his Report that his rainfall data shows that there has been a sustained increase in the mean annual rainfall over South Africa from 497mm to 543 mm during the 78 year period of continuous district rainfall records which agrees with the IPCC figure of a world-wide increase of between 0.5 and 1% per decade during the 20th century.

Over the whole of South Africa this rainfall consists of high and low rainfall events but Alexander argues that it is the high rainfall events that are most significant, saturating the soils that sustain natural vegetation and agricultural crops. Claims that seasonal and daily properties of rainfall may have been adversely affected by climate change, despite the general increase in rainfall, are illogical. Elementary physics require that an increase in global temperature must result in an increase in evaporation from oceans, lakes, rivers and dams and from damp soil . It is equally obvious, Alexander argues that excess moisture must return to earth in the form of increased rainfall . Papers based on modelling warning of threats to biomes and potential desertification with habitat and species destruction have ignored the data.

Here’s a quote from the Part 2 of the Report:

‘In southern Africa in general, and in South Africa in particular, we have a wealth of routinely observed hydrometeorological data that is collected at a rate of about half a million station-days per year. Many rainfall records exceed 100 years in length. Yet this data is totally ignored by these authors who rely solely on the outputs of global climate models and simplistic rainfall and run-off model assumptions for their analysis. (A p 46.)

This concludes my survey of Professor W.J.R.Alexander’s 2006 Report. Herewith I add the following as a possible mechanism for the sunspot/rainfall correlation that Professor Alexander observed…

Galactic Cosmic Rays a mechanism?

The cosmic ray link between solar activity and the terrestrial climate is that changing solar activity is responsible for a varying solar wind strength. When the sun has more sunspots it has higher magnetic activity. A stronger solar wind will reduce the flux of cosmic ray reaching Earth, since a larger amount of energy is lost as they propagate up the solar wind.

The cosmic rays themselves come from outside the solar system supposedly from exploding stars. Since cosmic rays dominate the tropospheric ionization, an increased solar activity will translate into a reduced ionization, and empirically also to a reduced low altitude cloud cover. Since low altitude clouds have a net cooling effect (their “whiteness” is more important than their “blanket” effect), increased solar activity implies a warmer climate.

As a follow on, I’m posting an extract to a post by astro-physicist Professor Nir Shaviv with links to the research that he and Professor Henrik Svensmark have done on cosmic rays and sunspots as a factor in middle latitudes rainfall process on Earth. In this post he also draws attention to the successful outcomes of Jasper Kirkby’s Cloud Chamber experiment which was so delayed by bureaucracy but which has been successful in what it set out to do. See below.

The Cloud is Clearing.

By Nir Shaviv.

The CLOUD collaboration from CERN finally had their results published in nature, showing that ionization increases the nucleation rate of condensation nuclei. The results are very beautiful and they demonstrate, yet again, how cosmic rays (which govern the amount of atmospheric ionization) can in principle have an affect on climate.

What do I mean? First, it is well known that solar variability has a large effect on climate. In fact, the effect can be quantified and shown to be 6 to 7 times larger than one could naively expect from just changes in the total solar irradiance. This was shown by using the oceans as a huge calorimeter (e.g., as described here). Namely, an amplification must-be-operating.

One mechanism which was suggested, and which now has ample evidence supporting it, is that of solar modulation of the cosmic ray flux, known to govern the amount of atmospheric ionization. This in turn modifies the formation of cloud condensation nuclei, thereby changing the cloud characteristics (e.g., their reflectivity and lifetime). Look here.

So, how do we know that this mechanism is necessarily working? Well, we know that cosmic rays have a climatic effect because of clear correlations between unique cosmic ray flux variations and different climate variability. One nice example (and not because I discovered it 😉 ) is the link between cosmic ray flux variations over geological times scales (caused by spiral arm passages) and the appearance of glaciations (more about it here). We also know empirically that the effect of the cosmic rays is through the tampering in the properties of cloud. This is through the study of Forbush decreases which are several day long decreases in the galactic cosmic ray flux reaching the Earth. Following such events, one clearly sees a change in the aerosol and cloud properties (more here).

So what is new? Well, the new results just published in nature by Kirkby and company are the results of the CLOUD experiment. This experiment mimics the conditions found in the atmosphere (i.e., air, water vapor, and trace gasses, such as sulfuric acid and ammonia). It is a repeat of the Danish SKY experiment carried out by Henrik Svensmark and his colleagues (e.g., read about it here), and it produces the same results—namely, they show that an increase in the rate of atmospheric ionization increases the formation rate of condensation nuclei. The only difference is that the CLOUD experiment, with its considerably higher budget, has a better control on the different setup parameters. Moreover, those parameters can be measured over a wider range. This allows the CLOUD experiment to more vividly see the effect.

…………………….

A comment in conclusion: Nature is the ultimate reality and nature’s mysteries are many- layered. Humans questioning those mysteries have made discoveries about that reality. investigation, on one level, through our senses, our questions and measuring, like that Rodda Nilometer in Egypt, and at deeper levels, using the same approach with new tools enabling us to ‘see’ further, such as telescopes , microscopes and space probes. To learn what is real and evolving in our world requires open enquiry and not closing down research. Those investigations by Alexander, Svensmark and Shaviv warrant serious consideration in our attempts to discover this reality. Closing down alternative investigation and asserting that only CO2 may be considered as the driving dynamic of our weather is anti-science and not a verified truth.

A coterie of group-think climate scientists peer-promoting each others papers does not further the discovery of nature’s reality. To quote another cat figure from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, ‘The mouse’s tale:

‘I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,’ says cunning old Fury.

72nd EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

A Readers’ Guide to Critical Race Theory

 

Helpful definition : “Critical Race Theory, a guilt strategy for the purpose of dividing communities, ( segregation) and moving resources…”

Yes it’s a policy of new segregation, something abandoned in western democratic cultures in the 1960’s, now being resuscitated under the guise of inclusiveness.

When Martin Luther King declared his dream of the day his children would be judged, not by the colour of their skin, but by their character, which heralded reforms in the United States to uphold it’s constitutional law of freedom and equality before the law for all, * that is now a broken dream with Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory proclaims a racial theory that people must be judged by the colour of their skin, or by their gender category, the kind of categorisation Mao Tse – tung promoted in the 1960’s in his Cultural Revolution, and Hitler carried out in the 1940’s with his racial genocide against Jews and Gypsies.

*X1V Amendment US Constitution. No State shall make or enforce any new law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection before the laws.

The what and whyfor…

Critical Race Theory is fast becoming the new institutional orthodoxy of western societies. We need to know what it is so that we can combat it. It is a race-based, revolutionary program that makes all white people responsible for the ills of the historical past and they are allotted oppressor roles for evermore. People are categorized in roles of oppression and victim-hood and only people of colour, perennially victims, have the right to speak of their experiences or views.

Free speech is limited for white people, especially white males, they are expected to acknowledge that they are complicit in the history of slavery and colonial exploitation and must continuously declare guilt for these past events.

Critical Race Theory began in western universities, but has it’s roots in Marxism. Marxism was a theory of class conflict as we know. During the twentieth century, a number of regimes went down the communist path but each ended badly. Their gulags, show trials and mass food shortages are not forgotten and by the mid 1960’s Marxist intellectuals in the West began to recognise that a workers’ revolution was unlikely to occur in western democracies. For example American peoples embraced ‘the American Dream’, the idea that education and hard work were the means of improving their lot. The radical left had to seek alternative ways to stir up dissent.

Marxists are adept at commandeering causes. Cited in Douglas Murray’s ‘The Madness of Crowds’ is a popular book, ‘Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,’ (2001) written by two post-Marxists, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who claim that Marxism has been challenged by ‘new kinds of contradictions’ and that the notion of class struggle needs to be set aside to find ‘ a new kind of exploited person.’ Hence commandeering the grievances of the student protests of May, 1968, in France, students against the school system, women against social discrimination, gay people demanding liberation, anti-nuclear and environmental protesters. These protests in May, ’68 presented a new way to articulate Marxism within contemporary society.

Masters of language, Critical Race theorists use euphemisms like ‘diversity and inclusion’ and ‘equity’ to sell their message. ‘Equity’ for instance, sounds like ‘equality’ to the unwary but it has nothing to do with the principle proclaimed in the US Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution with the X1V and XV Amendments.

Equity, as defined by Critical Race Theory is little more than reformulated Marxism involving a revolutionary redistribution of wealth in society. Christopher F, Rufo, director of Battlefield, a public policy research Centre, ( See IMPRIMIS blog ) has an article in which he refers to UCLA Law Professor and Critical Race theorist Cheryl Harris proposing suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines. He refers, also, to CRT guru, Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Centre for Antiracist research at Boston University, who has proposed the creation of a federal Department of Antiracism that would be independent of the elected government, with the power to veto or nullify any law at any level of government. This body would also have the authority to curtail the speech of political leaders and others who are deemed insufficiently antiracist. Ibram X. Kendi also states, ‘ In order to be truly antiracist you also have to be anti-capitalist.’ In other words, identity politics is a means to Marxist ends.

Escape from the lab…

Critical Race Theory is a mind virus that has spread widely since its beginnings in western universities. It has permeated the public service bureaucracy, education, journalism and big tech, and is threatening the social cohesion of western society, as it was meant to do.

About the public service, there’s John O’Sullivan, International Editor at Quadrant, (2020/10)’ in an essay, ‘Complexity, Your Modern Scoundrel’s Last Refuge,’ describing behaviour of the public service in Whitehall, with documented examples of civil servants giving unqualified support for BLM, even though the leaders of Black Lives Matter organisation ‘self style as Marxist’, and even though the job of public servants is to implement the policies of their government. ‘They’re not supposed to take controversial stands against the government of the day,’ as O’Sullivan points out.

Journalists and Big Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google are active partisans of Critical Race Theory. Making use of their private actor status, Twitter and Facebook suspended former President of the US, Donald Trump’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, among many others that don’t follow the left wing views of these Companies’ leaders. Google has been shown to manipulate it’s algorithm to have an anti conservative bias. Because of the size of these Tech Companies they are able to act as the city square, stifling discussion of policies that conflict with their own Democrat Party views on racism , or other dogmas. Which they do. Click here to see Glenn Grenwald on censorship of free speech.

What does critical Race Theory look like in schools? Christopher Rufo describes how K-12 values- based education permeates classroom teaching. In Cupertino, California, for instance, an elementary school forced first graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and rank themselves according to their ‘power and privilege’. In Springfield Missouri, a middle school had teachers locate themselves on an oppression matrix based on the idea that white, English-speaking Christian males are members of the oppressor class and must atone for their ‘covert white supremacy.’ Examples abound of these practices involving students and teachers at all levels of education. In New York a parent has removed his daughter from the prestigious girls’ school, Brealey, and written a letter to the other six hundred parents at the school which has got on to the internet. He writes objecting to:

‘the indoctrination at the school of its students, and their parents, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.’

It is a strong letter. A small sample of its content:

‘I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin , but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs…

I object to the charge of systematic racism in this country. Systematic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of the Japanese and the exterminating of Jews.

I object to mandatory anti-racism training* for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna.

*Sessions, he says, that are sophomoric and simplistic. Read the rest of the letter here.

Something else to be said further to those objections, Critical Race Theory has another major flaw…

Its Unfalsifiable…

You know the old saying, Damned if you do and damned if you don’t! Well Critical Race Theory works like that. Like Marxism, says John O’Sullivan in his essay cited above, it supposedly rests on self-evident axioms from which all conclusions derive, it’s constructed so that ”’whatever responses a white person might make to a question of an allegedly ‘racist’ episode, the theory shows them to be racist.’ As O’Sullivan says,’ A critical theory that denies the possibility of criticism from outside the theory is as slippery as a greased pig.’

O’Sullivan, in his essay also cites Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s book, ‘Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody.’ Pluckrose and Lindsay, both ranging from the left and right of politics, have written what O’Sullivan calls ‘the indispensable guide to ‘woke ideology,’ ‘ establishing that such policies which ostensibly favour the poor and minorities do not do so and may even do the opposite. I can’t vouch for this but I have listened to Helen Pluckrose on Youtube and she is very logical and highly researched.

That such policies as critical Race Theory do harm the poor in black communities is something that academic, Thomas Sowell, argues. Thomas Sowell tells of growing up as an orphaned child in Harlem in the thirties and forties and fully benefiting from the good education he received in the public education system of the time, before it was ‘reformed’ by teachers’ unions that have so dismantled public education today. He has looked at educational results as data, and advocates schools of choice for poor parents, allowing Charter schools to flourish, schools which have got measurably better results than in the public schools but that are opposed by the teachers’ unions in the public schools.

Instead of the new, U.N, narrowed-down curriculum involving a particular dogma, Charter Schools aim for student autonomy as the development goal, developing critical thinking skills and other life competencies. This means a Math/Science based curriculum as well as a broad-based History and Western Canon Literature study that covers many ways life has developed.

In a study of our own Western history, we should acknowledge troublesome past events like war and slavery, but also acknowledge the events of which we can be proud, like abolishing slavery, universal suffrage, and in the 1960s, reform of abuses that had arisen, like segregation in the southern states of America. To state otherwise, to ignore some aspects of the past for some purpose of your own, is to distort the historical record.

The banning of the books.

In public education schools today, tracts and articles on a theme are more in favour than white man literature or female literature that doesn’t suit the narrative. Of course Shakespeare and Cervantes no longer measure up, not even Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, as masterly a denunciation of slavery as you could find… where the acceptance of slavery is so pervasive in a community of otherwise ordinary people, that you hear this from Huckleberry Finn when he is deciding whether to hand over the run away slave, Jim, to the authorities:

It was a close place. I took up… [the letter I had written to Miss Watson] and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, “Alright then, I’ll go to hell.”- and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they were said. And I let them stay said and never thought no more of about reforming.

The irony it’s burning…

In conclusion.

What’s going on in western civilization strikes at the heart of its culture, a culture in which the individual is of value in his or her own right, and not merely as a member of some group… that is the norm. In western civilization, this means getting on with your neighbours, not kow-towing to them, not brow-beating them, but getting along together, being generous and tolerant of their views though sometimes speaking out about what you think, but being kind to each other.

That’s all, folks.

 

 

71st EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

 

FAIRY TALES AND US.

 

 

Once upon a time there were two children, sisters, who caught a childhood disease called The Measles. This was in the days before children were vaccinated against the disease so The Measles was a common childhood occurrence. One of the sisters quickly recovered but the other one did not. She knew that she must be very ill because a bed was made up for her in her parents’ bedroom where for several long weeks she had to rest quietly with the curtains’ drawn…This was because The Measles might have some bad effect on the patient’s eyes, the little girl didn’t know what, as they never told her, but the worst thing for a seven year old child was having to rest quietly, day after day, with nothing TO DO.

To pass the time, the little girl used to stare at her parents’ antique wardrobe which was made of dark walnut wood with patterning that looked like pictures to her. On one wardrobe door she could see the face of a grinning gnome peering over a stable door, and other whorls and loops seemed like trees in a forest, in which half hidden creatures of the forest gazed into the room. Another diversion was when the little girl’s mother read her a fairy tale from one of the books her father bought her after she became ill. The books were Grimm’s and Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales, and she spent a lot of the day thinking about what she’d heard. Sometimes she asked for a repeat- reading of one of her favourite stories.

At last she was well enough to leave the dark room and when she got her strength back, escape into the sunshine and play, but she had acquired a taste for listening to fairy tales, not that there were many fairies in them that she came across, and was soon reading them for herself. You probably guessed that the little girl long ago, who was very ill with The Measles was me. And now I’m going to do this post on Fairy Tales.

The Uses of Enchantment.

There’s a book by Bruno Bettelheim, interned in German concentration Camps in WW2, and recognised as one of the important psychoanalysts of the Twentieth Century, that extols the role of fairy tales in helping the development to maturity of young children. The book, ‘The Uses of Enchantment,’ shows how fairy tales help children cope with their own baffling emotions and their feelings of vulnerability and helplessness in relation to the mysteries of the outside world. Since I largely agree with what Bruno Bettelheim has to say about our childhood struggle to understand ourselves and a world that can seem so bewildering to our young selves, herewith, I will give a brief overview of what he has to say about fairy tales.

Children’s Fairy Tales, they’re old folk lore, how old is uncertain, but characters and setting suggest at least the Middle Ages, passed on usually orally and honed in the telling, the setting often the dark forest, the action involving magic and enchantment. The characters are archetypal, the hero, the hunter, the giant, the witch or wicked stepmother, the wolf or some other beast, often capable of speech.

Fairy Tales carry important messages to the conscious or unconscious mind on whatever level the child is functioning at the time, says Bruno Bettelheim, whether ‘experiencing narcissistic disappointments, oedipal dilemmas, sibling rivalries, becoming able to relinquish childhood dependencies, or gaining a sense of self worth, and a sense of moral obligation…’ ([P7.]

It is characteristic of fairy tales to depict an existential problem briefly and pointedly, a problem that the child is experiencing or is likely to experience. This enables the child to come to grips with the problem in its most essential form, whereas a more complex plot would only confuse the child. All characters are typical rather than unique. The figures in fairy tales are not good and bad at the same time, each character is either good or evil and the child learns morality by identifying with one of the characters, making his or her choice based on which character arouses sympathy and not antipathy. The struggles of the hero in fairy tales imprint morality as the hero makes a positive appeal on the child.

Bruno Bettelheim largely applies his analysis to the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. They’re aptly named, the tales are certainly grim, dealing with the fears of small children concerning the mysterious world, the mastering of their fears and passions, their jealousies and fear of abandonment, their own inadequacies and doubt of being able to cope in that world out there, being central concerns of a child. But what takes place in these stories is a positive outcome. The lone hero figure of the story leaves home, overcomes problem situations, sometimes with the help of other people or animals in the tale, animals, says Bettelheim, often being manifestations of the child’s own most primitive passions and fear of being devoured by them, but in the end he or she gets to live happily ever after, often married to a prince or princess, and there you are, oedipal problems solved!

What is true in the fairy tale can be true in the child’s real life, there’s hope for the future, not the ‘happy ever after’ bit, the child knows that, but the assurance that the child can succeed in life and form satisfying bonds with someone other than one’s own family. There’s always a happy ending to a Grimm’s Fairy Tale.

Much of children’s reading, says Bruno Bettelheim, fails to deliver the message. The primer books from which the child is taught to read in school are designed to teach the necessary skills, irrespective of meaning. Your didactic cautionary tales usually end badly, you get what’s coming to you. ‘The overwhelming bulk of the rest of so -called ‘children’s literature’ attempts to entertain or inform, or both. But most of these books are so shallow that little of significance can be gained by them.’ [p.4]

What is significant, however, Bettelheim argues, is that a struggle against difficulties in life is unavoidable and is an intrinsic part of human nature. The fairy tales collected by the brothers Grimm demonstrate this. It doesn’t matter that the characters and setting are from a different time and place, or create a magical process, the important thing is the existential struggle going on, which no parent can make disappear for the child. Some parents believe that only conscious reality and pleasant, wish-fulfilling images should be presented to children the sunny side of life, but real life is not all sunny, avoiding the harsh events of fairy tales does not prepare the child for life. Woke-ness and warning alerts of distressing content will not prepare children for future life, actually the opposite. But there has to be hope, hence the happy ending

For some parents, however, the happy ending of fairy tales is unrealistic wish-fulfilment, they completely miss the significant message it conveys to the child, that only by going out into the world and forging new relationships can he or she escape the separation anxiety which haunts the child. If we try to escape the separation and death anxiety by desperately keeping our grasp on parents, we are likely to be cruelly forced out like Hansel and Gretel. Only by going out into the world can the fairy tale hero (child) find himself and the other with whom he or she may live ‘happily ever after.’

For this reason, Bettelheim argues that some of the stories by Hans Christian Anderson do not belong to the category of your fairy tale. Stories like ‘The Little Mermaid,’ ‘The Little Match Girl,’ and ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier,’ are beautiful but extremely sad, they do not offer the feeling of consolation characteristic of the fairy tale happy ending.

Speaking for a seven year old child, or memory of same long ago, I particularly liked some of Hans Christian Anderson’s tales, not ‘The Little Mermaid or ‘The Red Shoes,’ but I especially liked ‘The Snow Queen’ and ‘The Ugly Duckling’. While both stories meet Bruno Bettelheim’s criteria for the fairy tale genre, what I enjoyed in Hans Christian Anderson, was the colloquial voice of the tale teller and the interesting psychology of some of the characters, not that I knew anything about such things at that stage of life, but they stimulated my curiosity. Doubtless I benefited from the archetypal nature of old folk lore, but in Hans Christian Anderson there were those particular situations like the cat and hen story in ‘The Ugly Duckling’ both so complacent and taken with their own significance, yet living in the backwater of the old woman’s cottage. And in ‘The Snow Queen,’ it really shocked me when the little robber girl put her knife to the reindeer’s throat, she was laughing but you knew that she could easily kill the reindeer on whim, even as a child I sensed from this event, that sometimes people could be impetuous and savage like that, as well as sociable at other times.

There were also other lovely touches in Hans Christian Anderson’s tales, for example, the mother duck in ‘The Ugly Duckling’ stating old axioms such as ‘Green is good for the eyes.’ Then there are the strange landscapes in ‘The Snow Queen,’ Kai putting a warm coin to the window to thaw the glass and gaze out at the Snow Queen, and there’s the description of the snowflakes as living beings, I’d say I was appreciating a children’s literature beyond folk lore.

As I remember, what I didn’t like was the surprise ending to ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier,’ after all his ordeals, so bravely borne his faithfulness to his beloved, the paper doll, having been swallowed in the canal by a fish and ending up in the same room he had started in, only to be thrown into the stove by the random action of a child:

…and he felt himself melting. But he still stood there, steadfast, with his rifle at his shoulder. Then a door opened, the wind seized hold of the dancer, and she flew like a sylph right into the stove to the tin soldier, burst into flame, and was gone. Then the tin soldier melted into a lump, and the next day, when the serving girl took out the ashes, she found him in the shape of a little tin heart.

I didn’t like this sad ending but in adult literature the arbitrary event is not excluded, Charles Dickens uses it in ‘Great Expectations,’ where events are a consequence of a chance meeting at the beginning of the book. Lots of stories and dramas do it, and in life chance meetings or collisions do the same, the truck skewing across the highway and hitting a car, a chance meeting with a homicidal individual, a most unlikely flash flood event resulting in people drowning, are arbitrary events that have occurred in real life Whether children’s literature should include such arbitrary events is debatable, but the deux ex machina is part of adult literature.

As are tragic endings in drama. Shakespeare used them in ‘Macbeth’ and ‘ King Lear’, the main characters being made to face the consequences of their own actions, the only positive for them being their ultimate self knowledge, but too late in their lives. Can’t argue that dark struggle is part of children’s literature. and in books written for the older child. some may not end ‘happily ever after.’ As long as the general direction of children’s stories is struggle towards a positive outcome, children’s literature will continue to help children to mature from their reading, good literature doesn’t follow a woke ‘no suffering’ dictum.

In the best of children’s literature, following on from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, dark events are often part of the tale, even in ‘Peter Pan and Wendy’ there are boys who fell out of their prams as babies and lost their families and in Never-land are pirates who would harm the lost boys if they caught them.

Lewis Carroll’s two books, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ first published in the mid-1860’and early 1870’s, two of the early books of children’s quality literature present a world where a young person leaves a familiar world for somewhere new and strange. How many times as a child did I read ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ I didn’t quite understand what was its fascination, but fascinate me it did. ‘Alice in Wonderland was a world where physical laws did not exist, where a child could grow larger or smaller in minutes by swallowing the contents of a bottle labelled ‘Drink me,’ or by eating one ‘side’ of a mushroom And the adults of both books behaved like unruly children, irrational, argumentative and dogmatic, the Queen of Hearts in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ shouting the command, ‘Off with his head,’ at whim during a ‘game’ of croquet, in ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ Humpty Dumpty and The Red Queen both being cavalier about the meaning of words.

Alice’s struggle for meaning is the centre of each of the books. In the arbitrariness of these two worlds, the only good sense come from Alice herself. Here she is conversing with the Red Queen, saying that she would try to reach the top of the hill:

“When you say “hill,”’ the Queen interrupted, ‘I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.’

‘No, I shouldn’t,’ said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last: ‘a hill CAN’T be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense –’

‘The Red Queen shook her head. ‘You may call it “nonsense” if you like,’ she said, ‘but I’VE heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”

Alice doesn’t get very far in these conversations.

Here are some of the books in children’s literature that conform to the genre of Grimm’s and some Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales and Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books. There’s ‘ The Secret Garden,’ by Francis Hodgson Burnett, in which two children, helped by a local boy who loves the natural world, heal themselves from problems their parents had brought on them. There’s Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Jungle Stories’ in which a feral ‘man-cub’ lives in the jungle, brought up by animals. There’s ‘The Silver Sword’ by Ian Serraillier in which young children survive in World War 11 when their parents become prisoners of war. There’s Roald Dahl’s ‘The BFG, about giants and an orphan girl – and featuring a friendly giant’s strange use of words, and there is also his novel, ‘The Witches’ with it’s challenging ending. A Newbury Award winner, the author Robert C. O’Brien also write two books in the genre, ‘ Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh,’ about lab rats that become very intelligent, and ‘The Silver Crown,’ with its surreal plot of evil forces emanating from a black crown, something like the ring in Lord of the Rings.

All these books with their themes of good and evil or other survival concerns make absorbing reading, even for adults. But there’s another kind of literature for children that you shouldn’t overlook and that’s the kind of delightful world you find in the children’s books ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ by A.A.Milne and ‘Wind in the Willows’ by Kenneth Grahame.

 

You found this kind of lovely fantasy in Shakespeare’s ”Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ part fairy tale and with actual fairies in it, and you find it, sort of, in Dylan Thomas’ ‘Under Milk Wood’.

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night…Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms…Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams. From where you are, you can hear their dreams.

You hear the dreams of people with these names: The sea captain, Captain Cat, Mr Pugh, Gossamer Beynon, Dai Bread the baker, Mrs Ogden Pritchard, Miss P rice, Willy Nilly, Nogood Boyo, and more. Oh what dreams they have!

What delight can come from such flights of fancy by humans. In children’s literature too. How enjoyable it is when Pooh Bear and Piglet build a stick house for Eeyore the donkey in ‘House at Pooh Corner’ and Ratty goes on a picnic in ‘Wind in the Willows.’ Alice in Wonderland delights us too. There’s that Caucus Race where the animal critters swim in a pool of the tears Alice cried in one of her growing phases. There’s the mouse’s tale, probably the child’s first experience of a concrete poem as in my case it was, – and there’s the Lobster Quadrille:

Will you, wo’n’t you, will you, wo’n’t you, will you join the dance,
Will you, wo’n’t you, will you, wo’n’t you, wo’n’t you join the dance?

Like a horde of children before and after me, we did join the dance in spirit, thank goodness for that! There’s so much to enjoy and engage with in children’s literature, a precursor to Shakespeare and Chaucer and Thomas Hardy and…

70th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

69th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

CHECKS AND BALANCES … THE POLITICAL RESTRAINTS AGAINST ARBITRARY AUTHORITY.

 

Checks and balances, those power sharing principles of government under which its separate branches, legislative, executive and judicial, are each empowered to curb actions by the others.

Quoting John Adams, one of the framers of the US Constitution:

It is by balancing each of these powers against the other two, that the efforts in human tyranny can alone be checked and restrained, and any degree of freedom preserved in the constitution.

In the western world’s long and chequered history, political democracy is a rarity, more common tribal societies and the later political development of rule by divine right of kings. Not much need for checks and balances to limit power in either of these systems.

That earlier political system, a tribal closed society ruled by a chieftain or oligarchy of aristocrats, required no internal checks or balances because in tribal societies no distinction was made between the customary regulations of social life and the regularities found in nature. What need of checks and balances when institutions were gifted by the gods and ways of acting determined by taboo? The later political system of territories ruled by kings often took advantage of this magical persuader to proclaim their own divine right to wield authority. Any checks and balances employed were used, not to protect liberties, but to maintain their own autocratic power. These checks and balances took the form of carrot and stick practices such as granting privileges to a noble elite or royal army in exchange for support, to imposing harsh penalties for disloyalty and hiring lots of spies to get wind of sedition or potential uprisings by discontented plebs.

History being a tale of human agency, albeit within a potent context, aims requiring means, when expanding tribal populations took to the sea and commerce, coming in contact with different cultures, those old certainties began to break down, with philosophers like Protagoras and Democritus formulating the doctrine that institutions of custom and law are man-made and therefore able to be altered. By 6th century B.C. around the Mediterranean Sea, this new mode of thinking led to the partial dislocation of tribal life and to the political revolution that was Athenian democracy, with its great spiritual development, the invention of critical discussion.

That Greek Revolution.

In 507 BC, a propitious year for freedom, the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced a system of political reforms he called Demokratia – the first known democracy in the world. Athenian democracy was a direct democracy composed of three institutions, the Ekklesia, a sovereign body that wrote laws and dictated foreign powers, the Boule, doing most of the hands on work, a council selected by lottery from each of the ten Athenian tribes, and the Dikasterea, the popular courts in which citizens argued cases before a group of paid jurors who were citizens over the age of thirty, also selected by lot but on a daily basis, so no entrenched public bureaucracy to way-lay democratic decision making.

Affirming the new system, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote: ‘In a democracy, there is first that most splendid virtue, equality before the law.’ Athenian equality before the law, as thereafter in most democracies in their formative stages, was not extended to everyone, however. The Athenian Demokratia allowed this privilege only to all male citizens over the age of eighteen, women and slaves taking no part in the Athenian demos. Nevertheless, compared to Athens’ previous system in which Athenian aristocrats monopolised decision making, the Demokratia was a great leap forward for rule by the people and achieved remarkable developments.

In its two hundred year existence, despite attacks from the enemy abroad, mainly tribal Sparta, and at home, from aristocratic enemies of democracy like the oligarchs known as the Thirty Tyrants, who tried to overthrow it, Athenian democracy produced a remarkable flowering in philosophy, Socratic debate, speculative science, history as a study of human action, and in the arts. Athenian painters and sculptors helped bring about a revolution in representative art and perspective, its tragedians transformed theatre, innovating dramatic form and exploring the human condition in great depth, including giving voice to powerful women… So many achievements in so many fields that initiated the dynamic and humanist tradition that is western civilization.

And most importantly, Athenian democracy paved the way and provided a model for later democracies, from the Roman Republic to the Constitutional Monarchy of Great Britain, to the varied democratic constitutions of the nations of the British Empire, and to the republican experiment in democracy of the United States of America.

‘Equality before the law,’ it’s the essential democratic principle shared by Athenian and modern democracies. How to achieve it – and keep it? By a process of fair and regular elections, every adult citizen having the right to vote and the party with the majority vote getting to make the parliamentary decisions for the next term. Is there a better way? The Athenian demos, western modern democrats and Winston Churchill say ‘no.’ Those who define democracy as mob rule, those Athenian oligarchs, Plato and some western elites, say ‘yes.’

But consider this. What is the opposite of majority rule? Why, it’s minority rule, and we’ve seen in history how that pans out, certainly not a matter of ‘the wise rule, – for every wise Roman emperor, a Nero or Caligula to follow. And just how perfect is rule by a philosopher king? Plato’s proposed ‘Republic,’ based on ‘the noble lie’ and ruled by a wise philosopher king and aristocratic oligarchy doesn’t inspire confidence. What Plato proposed was a complete tyranny where none of the plebs were free to speak or act without approval from their masters. Where Plato asked ‘who should rule? ‘ those who value liberty ask instead, ‘what checks and balances need to be in place, to prevent those in power from replacing equality before the law with rule by a tyrannous minority?’

Rule by a tyrannous minority, there’s a case study in the 1930’s in Germany when Hitler overthrew the Weimar Republic. It also happened in the 1960’s in China when MaoTse- tung incited students in his Cultural Revolution to attack his rivals. It could happen to our western democracies. As in Athens, with its separate governing bodies elected by lot on a recurring basis, the West’s democracies today have checks and balances, a House of Representatives or Parliament to make decisions, an Upper House of Review, or Senate, except New Zealand, some elected, others not, and all the democracies have a judiciary or High Court to throw out decisions by the government of the day deemed unconstitutional. These being human institutions, however, and the human ambitions of its actors being what they are, these checks and balances do not always perform as intended and a democracy, like any other political system, is likely to attack from outside it’s borders or from enemies within them.

Things go awry.

Anyone who has read previous editions of Serf Under_ground Journal may know that serfs’ at the present time have concerns with how western democracies are withstanding such attacks. Some links here…

https://beththeserf.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/50th-edition-serf-under_ground-journal/

https://beththeserf.wordpress.com/2018/11/01/55th-edition-serf-under_ground-journal/

Serfs like myself are concerned that international bodies like the U.N. and EU, hostile to the democratic process, together with elites within nation states themselves, wishing to replace it with a new globalist world order, seek to impose broadly phrased, open-ended, that is, international laws and treaties on nation states that are intended to supersede a nation’s own well-considered, democratic constitution.

Constitutional lawyer, Professor James Allan has written a book, ‘Democracy in Decline,’ (connorcourt publishing, 2014) identifying the causes of decline in some of our most established and stable democracies, the Anglo-American democracies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Professor Allan’s book which he describes as part lament, part call to arms, is worth reading in its entirety for the depth of legal experience he brings to the discussion. Herewith I will attempt to outline some of his argument on the main causes of decline and challenges threatening the further weakening of these democracies.

James Allan is all for majority decision-making even though it may sometimes produce less than desirable results (as may also rule by minorities.) What democratic decision-making means is a matter of process, of how decisions are made. Democratic decision-making means commitment to letting the numbers count, even if some smart, well-informed people may disagree with that decision and argue that the quality of that decision is more important than the process by which it is made. Hmm, isn’t that the old ‘ends justify the means ‘ trick? Says James Allan, ‘For these people,’ says James Allan, ‘the rightness of their view matters more than democracy.’ They are not prepared to wait until they might be able to persuade enough others and their view is no longer the minority view.

So herewith those causes of decline that Professor Allan identifies in Anglo-American democracies, four causes which interrelate in subtle ways, but which, for the sake of clarity, he discusses as separate phenomenon. First under the spot light, an over-powerful and influential judiciary, supposed to be protecting a nation’s constitution but expanding their role to reformulating it. Secondly, the influence of international law, the more you look at how it was created, its lack of transparency, the more you are aware of its lack of democratic credentials, Thirdly, supranational organisations – probably should have written that with a capital ‘S’ and a capital ‘O’, how these organisations, the EU and second-tier bodies of the U.N. like its Human Rights’ Council, enervate democracy at the national level, Fourthly those undemocratic elites, those lawyers, lobbyists, officials, bureaucrats and self-styled human rights activists prepared to impose their own preferences and value judgements on the country without bothering to win a majority of us to this value judgement.

Who judges the judges?

So beginning with the judicial system, a century ago, Professor Allan argues, top judges in the Anglo-American democracies were more respectful to the elected branches of government and much less likely to gainsay the elected legislature. There were sometimes cases where judges needed to interpret some ambiguity in an enacted law but generally they would not attempt to over-ride or circumvent it. From the 1950s and 1960’s on, however, we see unelected judges, selected by appointment, in some countries by unelected committees, becoming more adventurous in their constitutional interpretations and more willing to block or redirect the views of the majority of voters as expressed in laws passed by their elected representatives. James Allan cites a number of cases in different countries where this has happened. (Democracy in Decline p 45.)

James Allan is arguing there’s a sea-change from the judiciary’s intended role, an interpretation of the words used in the Constitution or a Statutory Bill of Rights, which was not a blank cheque telling a future judge to give them the meaning he happens to think is morally or politically best. The original words in a nation’s constitution were debated and argued over by the people drafting them and the wider groups voting for them because they intended those actual words to matter. They were intended to provide a non-fiat form of constitution that put constraints on later judges from striking down or rewriting the elected legislature’s statutes. No blank cheque for judges, changes to the Constitution would have to be voted in.

One of the reasons democracy is in decline is that a lot of judges have moved from this view of looking at the framers’ original intention to one of treating the document to be interpreted as a metaphysical living tree or living constitution, a shift allowing unelected judges to gainsay or overrule the democratic branches whose role it is to make the laws.

James Allan analyses how these democracies, with the exception of Australia, have facilitated this living tree notion by adopting a Bill of Rights. While a Bill of Rights is sold to the electorate on the basis that it does not take precedence over the prior constitution and is locked in, not a blank cheque for judges, ( few would likely support it else-wise,) when Canada adopted its Charter of Rights in 1980, and New Zealand in 1990 and the UK in 2000 each adopted a Bill of Rights, these provisions were soon by-passed by judges taking advantage of the vague and amorphous language of their human rights statements that required interpretation. Using the living tree approach each of these country’s judiciary began exceeding their judicial power, invalidating prior law and soon asserting their right to do so. Here’s an example, the Ghaidan Case in the UK where the top judges asserted they now have the power, when interpreting all statues, to read words in, delete words and even ignore the legislature’s undisputed intentions, and do so even where there is no trace of ambiguity. Here is the actual wording:

It is now generally accepted that the application of S.3( the reading down provision in their statutory bill of rights) does not depend upon the presence of ambiguity in the legislation being interpreted. Even if, construed according to the ordinary principles of interpretation, the meaning admits of no doubt,S.3 may none the less require the court to… depart from the intention of the Parliament which enacted the legislation…  is also apt to require the court to read in words which change the meaning of then acted legislation so as to make it [bill of rights] compliant. (Democracy in Decline. p70.)

International Law, Guidance from the Olympian Heights

James Allan looks at the ways in which two kinds of International Law exert undemocratic influence on domestic law in each of the five Anglo-American democracies. The first is by way of ambiguously phrased UN International Treaties that play an increasingly influential role in determining judicial outcomes compared to less ambiguous, domestic statutes, international treaties which have been formulated without any citizen input. The second type of international law, known as customary law, is a non-treaty sort of international law that can flow on from treaties and have influence on local judicial decision making although it has never been agreed to by any accountable legislators.

In the first case, this happens by adoption of International Treaties like the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, (CRC) with its open-ended wording For example: State parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical and mental violence.

The ways the U.S, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand respond to these treaties has changed over the last 40 or so years. In Westminster political nations in the past, while treaties could be ratified by the country’s executive and not by majority vote, this didn’t matter too much because the treaty did not become domestic law. Treaties had little force despite ratification. In the United States, though, treaties were taken more seriously, requiring that they be voted on in the Senate and if ratified by a super majority, were expected to become statutory law.

Today in Westminster countries, treaties are being acted upon by judges as though they are part of domestic law. In the US, what is taking place is even less democratic with treaties like the CRC over-ruling constitutional law even when they have failed to win Senate approval.

So who gets to create and monitor these treaties? Why, they’re created and monitored by the UN member-committee consisting of those forty-nine countries that make up the Human Rights Council. Only seven of these members come from the five Anglo-American democracies, the overwhelming majority coming from countries with abysmal human rights records, countries that James Allan says, ‘you wouldn’t take any moral advice from if your life depended on it.’ (P 87.)

And there’s that second kind of international law known as customary law with its practises that ‘are inferred’ or ‘have been identified,’ referred to in passive voice to gloss over the question of who gets to do this inferring or identifying. Well who gets to make these decisions are publicists, legal academics who have no democratic warrant whatsoever, and as James Allan points out, as a group are likely to have political and moral values far to the left of the general electorate, and be appointed by a lawyerly caste because of their perceived ‘soundness.’ Regarding the election of this group of people into the International Court of Justice, many from non-democracies, a great deal of horse trading takes place, a method of selecting International Court judges that Allan describes as ‘opaque,’ By way of this Customary International Law process, when it comes to resolving debatable social policies. as with UN Treaties, a nation’s voters are overwhelmingly locked out.

So on to the third cause of decline of democracy in western nations, those supranational organisations.

Supranational Organisations – they’re ‘Groupies.’

In these organisations lots of diversity you might say, many geographies, many nations, some with parliamentary systems, others with presidential systems, some constitutional monarchies, some with no constitution at all, the diversity of democratic, or non-democratic provisions may be staggering. With the EU, a federation of democratic nations and the UN, a council of both democratic and non-democratic nations, votes are made by each country’s representative, individual members of that country having no say at all. Turns out it’s even less majoritarian because each country has equal representation, so countries with big populations get the same representation as much smaller ones.

In that supranational organisation, the European Union, though it may be a club of democracies, its countries do not vote on everything and individual citizens have no say. The EU is a supra-bureaucratic body in the which an unelected civil service proposes new laws and the parliament does not get to propose laws but only veto them.

The UN is also democracy deficient, specifically in its second-tier agencies, like the Human Rights Council, controlled by voting blocs from the world’s despotic nations, Sudan, Cuba, China … any wonder that there are ever more sweeping powers for judges under UN made prescriptions, any wonder that there are ever more regulatory controls on the freedom of a nation’s citizens to make their own decisions.

Supranational organisations, one of the external causes of a nation’s democratic decline, that fourth cause of decline, sadly, those undemocratic elites that undermine it from within.

Undemocratic Elites, we who know what is for the best…

Of course we know about those judges and lawyers, lobbyists and publicists, any of those elitists ‘prepared to impose his or her preference or sentiment or long thought out value judgement on the country without bothering first to convince a majority of us that this preference or that value belief or this moral position is the best one (or least bad one,) in the circumstances. ‘ (D/D P121.)

Apart from those elite judges and that elite international legal fraternity, there are also some parliamentarians prepared to by-pass the electorate to get their own agenda into law. There are elite politicians in the UK, says James Allan, who reneged in their undertaking to put entry to the EU to a referendum. Once ensconced in the EU, elite politicians have tended to drive policy through the EU rather than going the way of public opinion. In Canada, there are those elite politicians refusing to invoke S33 when domestic law is being invalidated, such as common law definition on marriage or abortion laws that are being changed. In the US, there have been many elected office holders, from the President down to elected Mayors, who prefer winning their victories in the courts, relying on the court’s interpretation of immigration laws, for example, rather than being prepared to court public opinion. In all our five nation states, these practices by supposedly accountable politicians are weakening our democracies.

As James Allan argues, if these elites were more attached to democracy, judges would be more deferential to electors and far less inclined to be adventurous in
their legal interpretations and politicians and international organisations would be more prepared to put issues to democratic vote. These are the actors James Allan targets in his book, ‘Democracy in Decline.’ To which I’ll add others like George Soros, Read his Manifesto and you’ll observe his globalist agenda and stated wish to bring down the US democratic state. Examine his Ópen’ Society Grants Program and you’ll see how he funds organisations like the radical Brennan Centre that work to subvert the US electoral system and funds educational institutions like Bard College, that specialise in training social justice warriors.

To James Allan’s undemocratic elites I’ll also add those Silicon Valley Big Tech directors, you know who they are, who are even now, as I write, shutting down debate in their social media outlets that is contra to their own leftist views. And let’s not forget the many academics in those publicly funded universities supporting hate-speech attacks by students against free speech, conducting cancel culture trials on recalcitrant teachers who must be sure to give warning if they say something that may discomfort some students. Say, what ever happened to Nullius in Verba, motto of The Royal Society? Oops, now it, too, has restrictions relating to open debate when it comes to matters it decides are settled science.

‘Let truth and Falsehood grapple,’ says John Milton,

‘ Who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? ‘

Let truth and falsehood grapple… Part lament, part call to arms, James Allan’s study of the ways checks and balances in our western democracies are being eroded. “Equality before the law,” the essential democratic principle is losing ground to minority rule.

How to rebuild our democracy? Knowing where the problems lie is helpful but discovering effective ways to solve these problems is easier said than done. Can’t be defensive, must first seize the high ground, the right to free speech, go on the attack, getting our coherent arguments out there loud and clear, arguing just how important it is that a nation’s democratic constitution be observed. Easier said than done, yes. But it’s gotta’ be done. – No blank cheque for judges to over-rule the democratic assembly whose role it is to make the laws.