sapere aude

Although these are not reflections suitable to an overcrowded prison cell in Khartoum, it really is interesting to observe the mechanisms of popular manipulation and the apparent attempts to minimise their impact (on the part of the judge). As they stream out of the mosques after Friday prayers the demonstrators are fired up in favour of the immediate beheading of Gillian Gibbons. Apart from the incongruity of 'taking offence' as a badge of religious commitment there is the total disconnection in this conduct between rhetoric and reality. Of course Rowan Williams is right to say that the sentence is an absurdly disproportionate response to a minor cultural faux pas, and one wonders how deeply cynical the agitators are ('conservatve clerics'). If we concede that it is monstrous and wicked to insult the Prophet then we can see why people might think that there should be severe punishment, why they might stream out into the streets in a fury. I suppose the point is that they don't get to consider the minor premise, that Gillian Gibbon is guilty of inflammatory insult etc. One has to suppose that the demonstrators are reacting because they have been told that some infidel Englishwoman has consciously insulted the Prophet, as part of a wider British plot to undermine Islam. And so they rage and rail against the image of a wicked woman, a ghastly Britannia, and Gillian Gibbon doesn't get a look-in, or a voice. But this happens all the time, reaction to an image which makes some sense of the reaction, but unaware of the reality. This is how manipulation happens, from the vile descriptions of the Jew in Nazi Germany (monsters of the infflamed imagination against whom one must in one's dream fight to the death with courage and firmness) to the routine savaging by the Opposition, synthetically worked up under a description of events which renders the reaction intelligible but without connection to the truth, and it is synthetic because they know that very well, which is what makes it all in its small way also vile. How sad to hear Cameron's insinuations against Brown's integrity, sad whatever one's opinion of Brown whose ordinary human flaws are out there on view, no longer exposed only to the private circle. And yet his integrity shines through his manifest mortification at the course of events.

'It is what I believed'

I watched the Aaronovitch interview with Blair the other night and was struck, once again, by his rhetoric of belief. "It's what I believe(d)", said with that emphasis of finality, of final appeal, offers us an ultimate token of authenticity and authority, as though there were never any questions about what one ought or ought not to believe. Tone of voice can be like a glaring light which makes everything else invisible. Should we have believed that Saddam Hussein was amassing WMD? 'Read the documents', he says. And it is true that most people thought that he must have had some. But, as the heroic Robin Cook, the French and other Europeans pointed out, this was not enough by itself as a casus belli. It was manifestly a pretext for a policy already determined on quite other grounds. Then there was the shameful misrepresentation of the French and Chirac about the famous second resolution. Blair defends himself and Bush, on the grounds that it was 'right' to 'go in' ('the right thing to do', like what he 'believed', in which all the rhetorical weight is placed upon the emphatic intonation of these phrases, rather than on the supporting facts of the case, the reasons that would normally clinch and justify their use, but where (in this case) the reasons are so slippery and shifting that no one would keep up with them or find them persuasive: as I recall there was a period in which official justifications altered almost daily as previous ones were challenged in the press). And although he says candidly enough that the horrors of subsequent events weigh heavily upon him, and weigh on him every day, he turns things around in his favour by representing what is happening in Iraq as an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. If there is a battle between good and evil it is relatively easy to be on the side of the angels, as he so manifestly wants to be, as we all want to be. It is much more difficult to know where the angels should stand when the situation is represented more closely in terms of the complexity of the political insurgency and internecine strife which was precisely the reason so many said it was crazy to invade in the first place. This was the forethought that should have deterred the invasion. But Blair then excuses himself by saying that it is the insurgents who are to blame for the present horrors ('troubles' seems too lightweight). And, of course, as we know, Iraq is at the centre of the great war on terror because we made it so by invading. The Americans could have done things so differently after their 9/11 experience. Iraq was the terrible and calculated sin which we first commit and from which then we instinctively exculpate ourselves, because how can we see ourselves otherwise than as shoulder to shoulder with angels.

Brag, sweet tenor bull ...

A beautiful, cold, blue-skied November morning in Birkenhead, down for coffee and newspaper in the new Caffe Nero, I read, to the background sound of Classic FM-type music, how much we are a client of America and that this is where the true loss of our sovereignty is to be located, not in our membership of the EU. And the football, we cannot reconcile ourselves to our new, modest place in the world. A nice piece by Simon Jenkins about how he was taught at the age of ten by the late Vernon Scannell who died in his eighties the other day.

I was listening to Ted Hughes' reading of Four Quartets this afternoon ... the backward half-look again ... but even Hughes cannot conceal the easy sanctimony of some passages. I must return to Leavis's critique of the poem. I listen to it warily enough becaue it still has enormous power and its rhythms get into your brain, which, while it shows that it is real poetry, sometimes you just don't want it in your brain. Years ago I read Basil Bunting talking to this effect, how as a poet he needed to keep his distance. As to the allegd murderer, Peter Tobin, and the primitive terror, the first instinct is one of a kind of glee or delight to hear that he has been attacked in prison: it is an instinct that I vigorously disown, but it starts up and reveals our origins to ourselves. I expect there are more advanced souls than me who have no such instinct, and I am glad of that ...

Remembering Simone

Peter Winch had us reading Simone Weil's The Iliad, Poem of Force quite early on. I first read it in Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks, and I still recall how stunned I was by its account of how force turns human beings into things, not just into corpses but into things that are still breathing. Much of human life is conducted far from hot baths ... But what I most remember is the idea that what pervades the poem but is never spoken is a burning sense of justice that is even-handed over the fates of the protagonists of either side.

To put it another way there is a perspective on the events that are described that is shown in the narrative, and it doesn't need to be stated in order to make its palpable presence felt, it is there in the tone of what is stated. Now of course I can refer to that perspective, after all I called it 'a burning sense of justice', but understanding that description depends upon feeling the impact of the persepctive itself. it is not the other way round: I gain access to the meaning through exposure to the perspective, not access to the perspective through an independent grasp of the meaning. This is what we call 'a burning sense of justice', this is what we call 'the majesty of death'. (cf Brian Clack's book on Wittgenstein and Frazer: you will need an Athens login to read this review, though)

But these reflections are prompted by my thoughts about the tribes because it seems so obviously one and the same thing. It is highly significant that there can be at least a tinge of sadness in the description of the warrior elite, the raiding parties, the killings, the reprisals, their description arouses something within us which focuses on just the futility of these things, something opens up within us because it is exposed to its object, to the natural object of its concern ... and someone else will say, no it doesn't, nothing opens up in me, speak for yourself. A certain kind of neocon might say this who thinks of the glory days that lie ahead for the New American Century, and their whole identity and sense of self is formed around this project, and these people will not think that the Iraq war was a disaster or its consequences a catastrophe, they really do think in the long term and they have emasculated or subdued their enemies for several generations, as they believe. I think this is the point of the clash between Socrates and his opponents in the Republic. A sense of what is just is instinct within us but requires to be awakened and the conversation between Socrates and the others is conducted between those who have not yet woken to this perspective and one who has. So there is no point of contact, certainly none around the concept of reason or rationality, or of morality commanding the assent of all rational beings. The idea that it should depends upon a trace memory of the Platonic notion of Reason which is for him a particular direction of desire. I think an analogue of this awakening is to be found in that sense one might sometimes have (I called it walking with the gods) of seeing the whole human condition spread out before one as an object both of joy and compassion. And yes, this is one reason for the claim that we created the gods, personified the discovery of 'something higher' ... nor is this hubris but rather a way of securing the perspective or its memory in our minds in a form that seems adequate to it. It is not a matter of understanding the gods in terms of a well understood conception of what it is to be human but a way of coming to terms with possibilities that stretch our understanding of what it is to be human at all. But, whichever way round, surely all we are talking about is Love as a reality into which we enter ever more deeply and cannot define its boundaries because we see none to define.... but such thoughts require a postscript. I suppose that it is too long ago that I talked with conviction about God, and the language I have appealed to here has been used by theists, God, after all, is Love, so one enters ever more deeply into the mystery of God, and so forth. But now I can see more clearly thepossibility of a different model, not the God of the process theologians, but simply that this possibility of Love continues to emerge, we can observe it and sometimes embody it, but that is all there is to say, we do not need to reinterpret theological language, we can simply abandon it ... and nothing gets lost.

On Wiping the Table after Breakfast

The philosophical significance of a simple act, you know the scene well enough, perhaps there is an oilcloth on the table, perhaps you have had marmalade on your toast and it has stuck to the newspaper which has then lain on the table and made it a bit sticky, and there are small spills and drips of milk from the jug and coffee stains from the mug. You find a dishcloth and put it under the hot tap, squeeze it out and start to wipe the table ... and from a certain angle everything looks clear and clean and you take the dishcloth back to the kitchen satisfied with your virtue. But then as you return you see the table from a slightly different angle ... and stains glint in the light from the window, stains that had been invisible before because you were not well-placed to see the light fall upon the surface, but for all that the stains were there!

No, gentle reader, this is not the lowest point of my philosophical life, but a significant moment. It shows something important about perspectives, that they can conceal as well as reveal, that what is concealed by one is revealed by another, that simply by changing your position you can see what you might otherwise have missed ... And let us take it further: on the first occasion you yourself stood in the light and so did not have the advantage of it; on the second occasion, you had moved out of the light ... Something of spiritual significance then in the act of wiping the table. Yes, yes, but everything now turns on the kind of examples you are going to give ...

Thinking about Kant

A first year lecture this morning on Kant's Groundwork ... actions done for the sake of duty ... actions done out of inclination lack moral worth even if the inclinations are towards sympathy or benevolence ... the problem is the assumption that one's inclinations are determined whereas the rational will is 'free'. But that concept of freedom is problematic, is too indeterministic and one's inclinations can be altered, strengthened or undermined. I wrote about this years ago in a paper called 'Moral Sentiments, Social Exclusion, Aesthetic Education' but it is often hard to recall what one's own position is, one has to work it all out all over again, start from scratch: I wrote some verse about this experience, put in the mouth of Socrates:

Thought is painful again and difficult
The material unyielding and unpromising

But better to say I've lost my way
Or that walls or undergrowth

And other obstructions on the path
Or the moonless night

Or a trackless landscape
—Let my dreams decide—

Bar my way or obscure my vision
Or leave me without a road

They don't know how confused
Agony and paralysis of mind

To be endured, suffered patiently
—And sometimes I endure, sometimes

I am hopeless like a patient bullock
That strains to the sting of his driver's goad—

Without clarity or focus or direction
As half-discerned a pattern’s shimmer fails

Not my choice the moment when it lifts
My condition of stupidity

In a spurt of excitement and speed of thought
Surge and surprise of connections

Then familiar ground, eerie memory:
Not an inch further than before

And only now does thinking start
Again creeping slowly forwards

But with such a calm of mind
Noticing everything

Effort precedes and follows
The brief freedom of vision

The vivid effortless moments they all praise
The commanding view from the tower

Where visiting is restricted
To a few, unannounced, summer days

Discovering the A68

Amy and I left Thurso at 0610 hrs and reached Leeds at about four o'clock, taking turns to drive. There was not much dawn light as we travelled down the A9 towards Inverness, except that we could see the lights of ships and boats out in the North Sea. But what was most memorable was driving down along the A68 from Jedburgh to Corbridge, across the Scottish-English border and along the tops of the hills of Northumberland, the home of the Brigantes. I have always wanted to be in that county and it was quite wonderful to drive across through that misty, mysterious landscape. Strange about the Brigantes ... I have been reading Hound by George Green, which is a re-telling of the story of Cuchullainn and Queen Maeve and the Red Branch, of Emer and Deidre of the Sorrows. (One of the things I like is the idea that story-telling might be woven around a basis of fact, and it recalls to me the strange transitional status of the Gospels, though I am probably completely wrong about that). Green uses the device of an outsider to guide us through some of the customs and history, the German charioteer washed up on the shores of Ulster. The thing about characters who are also devices is the extent to which their success as a character can match their function as a device. Sometimes it worked well, but at other times I could hardly distinguish him from characters from Lyndsey Davies or Stephen Saylor who have both written fictional accounts (of detectives) in the Roman Republic and early Empire). I have also started on a new version of The Tain by Ciaran Carson ... but, with the sense of the Picts in Orkney, etc., I am starting to see people as the descendants of the tribes. It is a bit like seeing the history of a face one knew of old in the lines of the face one sees now, exceept here it is reversed, one gets a sense of the earlier by looking at the later. In Orkney I feel as though I am surrounded by Vikings ... or of Picts or Celts, mostly living like crofters, with dark realities much more immediate, as immediate as it might be in an Afghan village, perhaps, a sudden alarm, and at least this man would be useful with a sword or other weapon ... And you know that under adverse circumstances, of alienation and neglect, young men in particular will revert to the darker aspect of tribal life, without the honour or the hospitality, as though our default positon, if we are not educated and nurtured, is that of war lords and henchmen (gangs, territory, raids, reprisals, revenge killings) Lord of the Flies, I suppose, and well enough known. Green's references to routine beheadings in skirmishes reminds one of some of the grim Al Quaeda videos. We are particularly shocked because we have forgotten all this ancestry, 'the backward half-look'. It comes to me the more strongly because Island life shows the possibility of the antithesis. Whatever might lurk uneasily beneath the surface, people are acknowledged ... and usually needed. And then one returns to Birkenhead and becomes anonymous again. But that is hardly it. One sees a kind of cultural dispossession and worse, the unemployment and the resentment and the alienation and the drugs and alcohol.

Rather washed out today after all the driving. Julia's Bistro next to the Ferry in Stromness was good.

The Storm

Not so bad so far, nothing blown away, though the wind is still sounding around the house and the rain washes against the windows. But all ferries were cancelled and no bus services on Mainland. It is sad that we are here for only a short time, for such a short time. We head back tomorrow afternoon, and will spend the night in Thurso again before driving south. Meanwhile, the gale's path from the north west is traced in spray and turbulence across the diagonal of St Tredwell's Loch. I can see how the constant noise of the wind can wear one down!

I have started to read A Jar of Seed Corn by Jocelyn Rendall, lucid and quietly ironic in tone.

Tonight we are off to supper.

I haven't done very much work, partly because I am too absorbed in my new surroundings, but I have been thinking about what I want to say. Suddenly I have a crowd of commitments, more than I am used to, though probably normal for the more professionally oriented academic. I am writing a paper for a collection on teaching philosophy, in which I shall try to use some material from Plato's Symposium that I have used elsewhere. (There is a draft further back in these postings). Then a paper for an RIP conference on Philosophy as Therapeia, then something for a symposium on the work of David Cooper at Durham, then a philosophy of religion paper for the RIP in London in February 09. More immediately I need to do a final version of my paper for the Philosophy as a Way of Life volume I am co-editing with Michael Chase.

Amy and I went to the shop against a strong wind and showers of splintering hail.

A powercut around five for several hours, so it was good to eat pizza and salad in a warm house bright with candles and an ample fire ... the lights came on as we sat eating our After Eights, then went off, then came on again. The wind is still strong but not quite as brutal ...

Weather

Severe storm force winds due tonight and tomorrow, coming in from Iceland, all schools and colleges will be closed ...

Wind from the West

I have been reading a brief history of St Boniface Kirk by Jocelyn Rendall, an elegantly written little book. It seems that it was part of a fairly large settlement, even though it now stands alone on the edge of the sea, with remains of a broch and other buildings still visible on the sea shore. "Monkerhoose" suggests a colony of monks in the vicinity. It is sobering to realise that there has been so much coastal erosion, that the kirk was once well back from the shore. JR suggests that it was called St Boniface because the saint's murder in Friesia was recent and well known.

I found that there was too much strong wind sweeping in from the West to inspect (with my amateur eyes) the remains below the church, in fact I was driven back by an icy flurry of slashing hail it was impossible to face head-on. But it makes you feel alive. It reminded me of my experience on Caldy forty years ago when I stood by the cliffs, leaning back comfortably on the wind.

There is a view of Eday far beyond St Tredwell's Loch from my bedroom window.

There was comedy and inconvenience on the way up. Soon after Lancaster the Toyota sprung a leak in the top hose, nothing worse than that, but the motoring organisation to which we belong by virtue of our bank account sub-contracted out and we received no visit from a resourceful knight of the road but a man with a trailer who was intent on 'recovering us' to John O' Groats, five hundred miles away: which he did, with some gallantry since it was a tough assignment. Anyway, lots of cancellations and new bookings, mostly done by Rosemary, and we finally made it after sailing from Scrabster across the deep and unsettling swell of the Pentland Firth and then into quieter waters as we came in to the beautiful Stromness ...