the prime of life – the first 100 pages

Its not hard, after the first 100 pages of the Prime of Life, to see reasons why Simone de Beauvoir’s  autobiographical writing might be so well regarded. We witness the personal and intellectual development of a woman with a finely tuned self-awareness, a development marked by an inclination both to question and to oppose (the latter sometimes at odds with the former, as the older and wiser author implies from time to time about her younger self) and with a roughly focussed, and optimistic,  appetite for knowledge and experience. Places, people, books and films are celebrated for themselves but also for their impact on her seriously undertaken mission to think out her considered understanding of the world.

One dynamic is of her and Sartre developing their ideas, their persona and their personalities, and their being as a couple. She has strong sympathy, but not full agreement, with his unfolding project to

Soros Gray Krygier – economic funamentalism as threat to open society

Discussion from Background briefing 10 years ago – good to remember in these supposedly post fundamentalist times.

Krygier excerpt: “I think if that’s what Soros believes out of Popper, he’s right to think that the enthusiasts for laissez faire capitalism who came to advise in post-Communist countries, and who seem to be in very prominent roles as advisors in Western countries, though their values are radically different and they don’t come with guns, nevertheless the certainty with which they espouse those values is similar [to totalitarian social engineering], and similarly flawed.”

choice has value only where there are choice-worthy options

Autonomous choice has value, however, only in an environment that is rich in choice worthy options. John Gray Enlightenment’s Wake p 12 summarising argument of Joseph Raz’s Morality and Freedom.

And more: from Berlin: incommensurabilities among ultimate values set a limit to the ambitions of theory in both ethics and politics. .. political life as being permanently intractable to rational reconstruction.

Idea then: forms of communal action under different types of states/ traditions. eActivism as an archetypal instance of liberal rights based ‘communal’ activism? vs types of activism in China and other authoritarian states vs secessionist activism?

science, civilisation, economics and democracy in China

Something we don’t know know, here, is that in the first part of the last (20th) century people in the West were generally ignorant of the scores of technological advances made by China before about 1500. Now the  idea that ‘ It’s well known that the Chinese invented masses of things before they were known of in the West‘ is commonplace whether or not most people could name any; there is at least a general understanding that fireworks and spaghetti have their origins in China. Joseph Needham records an average of somethig like 15 major inventions per century from the time of Christ until 1500 years later*, including not just Bomb, Book and Compass (the title of a book by Simon Winchester, subtitled Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China), and the predecessors of the first two of these, gunpowder and paper, but also centreboards and multiple masts, segmental arched bridges, ephedrine, the decimal point, stirrups, the breast strap harnass, negative numbers, toilet paper; and there’s more: they discovered diabetes is associated with sweet and fatty foods (in the first century BC!).

Once the general outline of the creativity and power of Chinese technology is understood, two more questions arise.

in or out of Europe

In Australia we have been trying to cut our last tie with Europe – our formal adherence to the English monarchy – for 15 years or so. In 1998 we temporarily lost our nerve, ostensibly over a squabble about what kind of republic to become. For a much longer time intellectual traditions on the periphery of Europe have conversely anticipated and often sought some kind of union:

For people like me , who live uncertainly on the edge of Europe with only our books to keep us company, Europe has figured always as a dream,  vision of what is to come; an apparition at times desired and at times feared. … A future but never a memory.  (Orhan Pamuk ‘Where is Europe’ Other Colours* 2007 p 190.)

What we share on the other hand is an ‘away from the centre’ consciousness. In an essay about Vargas Lhosa, Pamuk ascribes this, finding no other common bond, to Third World literature:

If there is anything that distinguishes Third World literature, it is not the poverty, violence, politics or social turmoil of the country from which it issues but rather the writer’s awareness that his work is somehow remote from the centers* where the history of his art-the art of the novel-is described, and  he reflects this distance in his work. What is crucial here is the Third World writer’s sense of being exiled from the world’s literary centers. [... an exile not cured by relocation to] ‘one of the cultural centers of Europe, for the writer’s exile is not so much a matter of geography as a spiritual state, a sense of exclusion, of being a perpetual foreigner.

No well-read Australian can read this without thinking of fifty years of cultural cringe, of writers hiding from, or playing to, their Australian-ness. For only a few Australian writers is it never an issue, an issue worn lightly or otherwise.

* The title is anglicised for the Australian edition but not the spelling inside..

macauley on behavioural economics

I obliquely mention behavioural economics from time to time, for example when drawing from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan which is full of references drawn from BE to back up his own observations.

This is a summary of You can see a lot by just looking: Understanding Judgment in Financial Decision Making by  Ian MacAuley published by the Centre for Policy Development provided by Fiona Guthrie

Main points

The discipline known as behavioural economics has strengthened our knowledge of consumer decision-making. It explains why we make certain, consistent departures from what is generally described as “rational” decision-making. These departures result from our use of short-cuts (“heuristics”) in situations where more deliberation would result in more beneficial decisions, from short-sightedness, and from innate concerns for fairness in transactions.

financial planners v charlatans

Nasim Nicholas Taleb is a money market guy with a talent for telling a story. He knows a lot about risk and a lot about our decision making biases. If we accept just a couple of propositions he puts forward, then one can see that a charlatan and a financial planner have many things in common – but they’re not the same.

i didn’t meme to make you cry

What is the page 123 meme? here’s one guy called Brad’s attempt to track it down. I like the “thigh bone connected to the shin bone we’ll get to the bottom of this by climbing up the ladder of links” approach. Especially that he has to really dig for some of the links – people not linking properly etc – and then in the end he gets back to 2004 and the trail goes cold .

At this point, I’ve made myself pretty sick of this meme. Often it appears to be a means by which people can brag about whatever erudite text they may or may not actually be reading. Even so, I can’t have wasted this much time and not play along.

But, for those like me who have a shaky hold on what a meme might be, I reckon – after skimming the extensive Wikipedia entry – that the blogger’s use (= intellectual game?) is drifting a bit from what Dawkins had in mind (gene – physical idea; meme – equivalent cultural idea).

One of Brad’s commentators calls the page 123 meme “the internet time-wasting sensation” – I thought that was Facebook .. just kidding. And I just noted Brad’s blog is called Footle. Look it up. Or save time by clicking here.

the art of the blog, or the random gait of the bicameral mind

I stumbled across the blog entry below googling ‘manguel octupus’s garden’ [it ends with a quote from A Reading Diary]. I’ve copied it rather than link – breaking all the known rules of blogging – as for me it illustrates a theses: that blog posts can have a certain beauty stemming from their semi-deliberate lack of context; the internal random link seen by the author between two or three ideas, facts, statements, never completely spelt out. And then there’s the external random potential intersections and correspondences between pages on the internet, including blogs, in this case bathysphere’s blog and this one.

And each of these intersections will last for a precise and randomly long period of time in the ephemeral soup of the internet – reminding me of Maryanne Wolf’s ‘protean’ vision of the reading brain – a blog, like a story has a start, middle and end. Perhaps there’s a novel that begins:

“Bathysphere’s last blog entry was Thursday, May 17, 2007. He reminded us that Salvador Dali nearly died in a diving bell – Dali told those watching one morning that he intended do descend as far as the unconscious… “

In his second last entry – An Octopus’s Garden – bathysphere corrected his previous post advising he was ceasing to blog, saying “I may be bringing this site back from the dead in some form…check back next month.” But he only managed that one dangerous post, 5 months later …

This, for mine positive, feature of the net – a machine that may create unexpected beauty – is for Maryanne Wolf a danger – she’s here summarised in a Guardian review:

… in the “Google universe”, with its instant over-abundance of information, how we read is being changed fundamentally. On-screen texts are not read “inferentially, analytically and critically”; they are skimmed and filleted, cherry-picked for half-grasped truths. By doing this we risk losing the “associative dimension” to reading, those precious moments when you venture beyond the words of a text and glimpse new intellectual horizons.

Anyway: here is the bathysphere post that caught my eye. And it ends in a paen to random ephemerality.

“The House Always Wins…”

This house on my home town street is being pulled down so a cemetary can be built on the land…or for all I know, the house has already been torn down, since I didn’t walk down there when I was in CT. I feel uneasy and strange about this sealed, gothic ruin and the corn fields around it being turned into an orderly place for the newly dead, as if all the passages to childhood mystery and awe were being rendered invisible and out of reach, or at least unrecognizable.

In the interview on the Cure DVD, Kiyoshi Kurosawa talks about the genius of his producer

the cloak of certainty

From an ABC Background Briefing – Sunday 22 June 1997 – http://www.abc.net.au – via (and full transcript at) proinvestor. e&oe

Tom Morton: In many ways, George Soros’ recent article on The Capitalist Threat seems to have been inspired by his experiences in Eastern Europe and his frustrations with the process of change there.

Soros points to a connection between the hardline free-market reforms advocated by some Western advisors, and the growth of poverty, crime, and neo-nationalist movements in Russia.

In his article on The Capitalist Threat, Soros argues that there are certain similarities between totalitarian ideologies like Nazism and Communism, and the pure doctrine of laissez faire capitalism. Common to each of them, he says, is a belief that they are in possession of a scientific truth, and any ideology which believes that, tends to be intolerant of dissenting views.

So how seriously should we take this argument?

Martin Krygier: I think it’s a serious issue. I think that Soros makes clear in that much-discussed and reviled article that he in no way suggests that there is anything evil in laissez faire capitalism to compare with the evils of totalitarianism. But he does spot a kind of similarity of temper in thinking about social fairs. What they have in common, and what is contrary to the Open Society as Popper outlined it, was a kind of overwhelming certainty that they had grasped the truth about this extraordinary complex phenomenon which is a society. Popper, in ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’ and also in a smaller book called ‘The Poverty of Historicism’ says that we can never know that much, and in science we never know that we know we should always be prepared to be proved wrong, and that’s the way science progresses. And so in social experiments, Popper insists that an ambition to change things overall, change things holistically – what he calls holistic social engineering – is bound to fail, and bound to have unintended and very often tragic consequences.

And so whatever your ideology, whatever your values, he says you should go for what he calls piecemeal social engineering. And I think if that’s what Soros believes out of Popper, he’s right to think that the enthusiasts for laissez faire capitalism who came to advise in post-Communist countries, and who seem to be in very prominent roles as advisors in Western countries, though their values are radically different and they don’t come with guns, nevertheless the certainty with which they espouse those values is similar, and similarly flawed.

Soros doesn’t say that there is anything in the consequences of economic rationalism which will spill the same blood, but he does – as Marxism more, or even more, Nazism – believe that this spirit of certainty is radically inconsistent with what he takes to be the openness to fallibility in an open society.

Strongly recommended: Martin Krygier Civil Passions. For more see this review. The review goes off on a tangent about Robert Manne but gives some idea & I can’t readily find a better one.