Broken China

An interesting video which to my mind sets a few hares running. There may be no direct comparison to be made with the UK, but it is worth thinking about our future retirement prospects, pressures on our welfare system, our widespread lack of religious faith and our lack of faith in government.

Not a symbol but a fraud

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1906)

Glass half full

Looking on the bright side of Brexit isn’t easy, but it has exposed the weaknesses of our supposed democracy. As many of us know, political life attracts the wrong people, the party system fails to screen them out and voters are far too tribal, far too casual and continually fail to spot the duds.

From a glass half full perspective, exposing the system for what it is must be healthy. Incidental exposure of the EU as an intransigent waste of space must be good too. Maybe we will even learn something from it.

Fiction and non-fiction

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything had been said better than we can put it ourselves.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)

Why do we read books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, web articles etc? Is it entertainment, information, education or something else? I don’t know why others read, but in part I’m looking for insights. Sounds pompous I know, but from what others have written online over the years, insight seems to be a very common reason for reading. It applies to both fiction and non-fiction.

Take two examples, firstly from fiction and secondly non-fiction.

Mrs. Dale was one of those empirical thinkers who love to philosophize generally, but who make no specific application of anything to their own affairs.

Theodore Dreiser – The Genius (1915)

The Hanoverian kings owed their position as kings to the Whigs. They paid for their right to reign by the abandonment of the powers that had hitherto inhered in the monarch.

Charles Downer Hazen - The Long Nineteenth Century (1919)

Of course insights vary between fiction and non-fiction as these two quotes demonstrate. They are certainly not equivalent, but the dividing line can more diffuse than we usually assume. Factual information is an insight in itself, but even factual information ends up distilled and compacted into wider and more general insights. Lists of facts are not in themselves particularly useful.

For example even a cursory study of Operation Barbarossa could lead to the obvious insight that this was Hitler’s biggest mistake. Alternatively one might study Operation Barbarossa in enormous detail, extract from it a number of insights about Hitler, Nazi Germany, Stalin’s regime, the course of WWII and so on. Insights become wider and more nuanced.  

On the other hand fiction may give subtle insights about human behaviour, social mores and the power of language. In many cases fictionally-derived insights are cogently expressed reminders of familiar viewpoints. Such insights may be expressed so powerfully that we absorb them into what we are whereas factual information may slip into the background.

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

Charles Dickens - Bleak House (1853)

…not a man of refined conscience, or with any deep sense of the infinite issues belonging to everyday duties; not quite competent to his high offices; but incompetent gentlemen must live, and without private fortune it is difficult to see how they could all live genteely if they had nothing to do with education or government.

George Eliot – The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Another difference between fiction and non-fiction is that non-fiction tends to be comparatively recent and written from a modern perspective. Obviously a vast amount of modern fiction is written from a modern perspective too, yet a vast amount of readable fiction and even non-fiction was written decades or even centuries ago from perspectives which are no longer modern but still valid.

But vain men are fools as well as ignorant of themselves, and make this plain to all the world; for, not doubting their worth, they undertake honourable offices, and presently stand convicted of incapacity: they dress in fine clothes and put on fine airs and so on; they wish everybody to know of their good fortune; they talk about themselves, as if that were the way to honour.

Aristotle – The Nicomachean Ethics

This escape from modernity can provide interesting insights into our modern concerns and assumptions. Often older fiction reminds us of aspects of the human condition which have slipped into the background but do not change.

The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being, may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them—like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes color an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)

In addition, older fiction frequently reminds us of numerous economic, political and practical changes which have influenced the way we live. These tend to be much more compact insights than a work on social history is likely to provide.

Wishing to be polite, he entered, in spite of the artistic disgust he felt for all that zinc, coloured to imitate bronze, and having all the repulsive mendacious prettiness of spurious art. ‘Good morning, monsieur. Is Henri still at home?’ The manufacturer, a stout, sallow-looking man, drew himself straight amidst all his nosegay vases and cruets and statuettes. He had in his hand a new model of a thermometer, formed of a juggling girl who crouched and balanced the glass tube on her nose.

Emile Zola - The Masterpiece (1886)

To my mind the attraction of older fiction is that we see fictional scenarios through eyes which looked out on a world no longer ours. Our times are so intense, so suffused with manufactured drama that escaping from it every now and then is something of a necessity. If we don’t escape we can’t see what it is to escape.

The Great Flushing

Brexit is certainly flushing out those with a somewhat attenuated hold on democracy. To the surprise of nobody, MP Phillip Lee's leap from the Conservatives to the Lib Dems has not been universally popular in the Lib Dem nest.

Former Tory MP Dr Phillip Lee's arrival in the Liberal Democrats has not been welcomed by everyone within the party.

Dr Lee's voting record showed he had abstained on a vote to legalise same-sex marriage and that marriage should be a matter for the church to reconcile.

He also voted for a "wrecking amendment" that attempted to stop the gay marriage bill, tabled by Tory MP Tim Loughton.

He also backed regressive policies such as screening immigrants for hepatitis before allowing them into the country.The move has sparked Jennie Rigg, who was chair of the Lib Dem LGBT+ group, to resign from her role and the party.

She wrote: "I thought the Lib Dems were not a single issue party. I thought we had a soul and principles.

"But apparently as long as you are on the right side on Brexit we'll take you. Well, I'm sorry, but no."

Weird people the Lib Dems. Imagine not welcoming a politically incorrect Tory reject. Jo Swinson seems to approve though.

Wordplay - Gauke

Gauke - verb; to distort esp politically; after David Gauke a UK politician

1. "Mr Gauke said he was prepared to put the national interest ahead of his own, showing his firm determination to gauke the term national interest."

2. "In order to make political capital Mr Corbyn has gauked his long-standing position on the EU."

3. "Mrs May had to resign after attempting to gauke the meaning of the word leave in her Brexit negotiations."

Elective dictatorship and missing the point

Apparently John McDonnell is trying to scare us in a way which rather misses the point. With Brexit we are trying to get away from a dictatorship we can't elect at all.