58. Déjà Vu and Wicked Stories

Posted on April 12, 2012 by thormay

So why do you read the news every day? Alright, maybe you don’t. I plead guilty. Not all of it of course, just the narratives I’ve chosen to follow. Funny how we pick our company. For me the deletes run through spectator sport, most local news – especially the TV favourites/ murders/ muggings/ petty scandals, general gossip shock-horror stuff .. it’s an eternal cycle. Perhaps that’s the beauty of it for people who like corner shop routines. Well, hooked on the grand sweep of international affairs, do I lead some blessed, wise and elevated life? Pardon the self-mockery. In the end it is an addiction like any other, perhaps more pointless than most since no happy band of fellow travellers gathers around the computer screen to survey the wider world. You can’t walk into any pub, club or workplace and start a conversation with complete strangers on the state of play of politics in Zhongnanhai, or population trends in northern Africa (but you can do just that for football heroes of the hour). Yes, I’m a fool to my own best interests if popularity is the game, but it is mighty hard to wear the heels of your shoes down in a different way after growing your own special slouch. Continue reading →

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57. Anchluss or ANZAC? – A Solution for Taiwan

Posted on January 17, 2012 by thormay

In the minds of China’s rulers, past and present, there has only ever been one possible view about the future of Taiwan. For a multitude of reasons – strategic, economic, ethnic, linguistic, historical and sentimental – they have believed that it should be properly incorporated as part of the Chinese state, and that the expression of any views to the contrary amount to treason. As a resident of China for five years, I cannot recall encountering any Chinese citizen who did not declare this “proper” status of Taiwan to be self-evident when asked. On this topic the Chinese education system has successfully promoted a consensus.

Anyone with a curious mind who has spent time in Taiwan, or amongst Taiwanese, will quickly conclude that the “self-evident” and “proper” status of Taiwan as a province of China is by no means accepted amongst the largest number of people there. The focus of disagreement within Taiwan is not on whether to surrender sovereignty, but on how to retain it. Continue reading →

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56. Choose When to Live and When to Die

Posted on November 9, 2011 by thormay

The more your spirit lives in a culture, the more you get what you pay for. After all, the culture has evolved, or perhaps been manufactured, to satisfy people just like you. Blessed are the average amongst us. Maybe your accepted culture has you salivating over a delicious dinner photographed on the plastic packet of a snap frozen supermarket meal. You will microwave the dubious mess inside the packet and suck it up. By the time you suck it up, your mind is on TV football or a soapy anyway. Such is one kind of happiness. If your culture is a millenium old and tells you that meat (or whatever) is unclean, you will smother some overcooked vegetables in curry and wash them down with a litre of Coca Cola to prove that you are up with the times. Such is progress.

These notes have not been written for average people in any known culture. ‘Culture’ is shorthand for a rough consensus on the grab-bag of events, habits, attitudes and actions that make up daily living. Once you start to ask questions about any of this stuff, you are stepping outside of the consensus. You are no longer average. You are alone in the big bad world, and there is nothing heroic about it because probably there is no one there to clap. So these notes are about non-average survival, specifically my own. Take what looks useful, ignore the rest.

I was born more or less born outside of much cultural consensus – a story too long to go into here – have never been on anyone’s dinner party A-list, have neither a fortune nor a family to lose, and perhaps only the neighbourhood dogs will notice when one morning I no longer appear for a morning walk. At 66 I have the superb good fortune to be still distance running, living a passably interesting life, and learning new things every day. Well, everyone goes to hell in their own way in the end. Personally, the only time I’ve been seriously unhappy is at times of poor health. Looking back I could have saved myself a lot of grief with a starting insight into the knowledge I’ve now accumulated over several decades, which is why I bother to share it here. There is so much ignorance and shonky advice out there, not least from medicos. Since I’m a teacher, I pass on a bit of what I’ve learned and people can take it or leave it. No missionary zeal intended. Anyway, here’s my pitch.
Continue reading →

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55. If A Market Is Not A Market …

Posted on October 26, 2011 by thormay

Long ago when the world was young I went to a high school to learn about the wonderful power of Markets and The Invisible Hand. A market itself didn’t have to be a shabby patch of ground with fruit stalls and bric-a-brac on sale. A market was a place, even an imaginary place, where contracts were exchanged. Contracts were a kind of agreement where two parties agreed to exchange A for B for mutual benefit.

Many kinds of contracts in history have only been possible when both parties agreed first of all to follow some set of rules. For example a man and woman might choose to live together because they find each other sexually exciting. Pretty soon however, to avoid conflict, they come to agreements about money, housework, having children (or not), and all the rest. In fact we know that most cultures have developed strict formal rules about such relationships, and sealed the deal with something defined as a marriage contract.

However, the people who taught me about market relationships were called economists. These economists usually conceded that there needed to be commercial rules or laws about particular kinds of market relationships. For example, the buyers and sellers of motor vehicles within Australia have to work within certain rules of disclosure, commitment and so on. However, the economists insisted that over and above the influence of local, particular regulations, market relationships were governed by a set of natural laws, akin to the ‘laws’ of physics, or perhaps biology. This was ‘The Invisible Hand’. For example, if there were many buyers and few sellers, the exchange relationship (hence the price if money was involved) would be tilted in favour of sellers.

The supply and demand law example seemed reasonable to an economic neophyte. Quickly my economics teachers projected this nice example to encompass and define the universe of daily life in which we struggle to make a dollar. At this point in the thesis, even as a 17 year old, my bullshit detectors went on red alert. The Invisible Hand sounded remarkably like the Invisible God, a trick of social control brandished by frightened authority figures, whom I had long since ceased to hold in awe. Ergo, I repeated the patter they wanted to hear for some examination papers, duly got an ‘A’ pass, and forever decided that economics was mostly humbug.
Continue reading →

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53. The South Pacific and Someone’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Posted on August 27, 2011 by thormay

This piece was written while I was a lecturer in linguistics at the University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji  from 1987 to 1990. Now it is 2011, but not so much has really changed in the Pacific for its peoples. Even inclusion into the new electronic universe of the World Wide Web remains a challenge. Fiji is the geopolitical capital of these states, a fact not widely appreciated outside of the region. Fiji, as predicted, has become enmeshed and stalemated in conflict between a quasi-reformist military leadership and the old colonial legacy of comprador-capitalism (a chiefly class getting kickbacks from foreign business interests) and at village level, religious paternalism of the kind that still constricts the Philippines and which locked down medieval Europe for a millennium .  (Finding the true heroes in a mess like this is best left to history..). The nascent Melanesian power of the region, Papua New Guinea, has increased its population to 7 million, but accelerated its downward spiral into a poverty stricken, corrupt and violent morass since being pushed adrift from UN protectorate status by Australia in 1975. (for example, see the Brisbane Times, 3 September 2011, ” PNG exposed as a dysfunctional blob“). PNG is not a “failed state”. It never was a state in any meaningful sense. It is a land of extraordinary potential, but for cultural reasons there will be extraordinary grief along the road to finding that potential.  For Australia it may morph into a serious security risk. China is now a much more active and sometimes corrupting player in the region for reasons both of geopolitics and resource gathering (for example see “China, Taiwan buy influence with secret payments to Nauru politicians“  Brisbane Times 29/08/2011). Indonesia, which is described as a military dictatorship in 1989, has since made a significant transition to democracy incorporating a form of devolved provincial authority. The regional metropolitan powers of Australia and New Zealand are, if anything, even more blind in public awareness to the Pacific Islands states than they were at the original time of writing. The Pacific Island states are a “problem” that the Australian and New Zealand political classes simply don’t know how to deal with since even with goodwill, the cultural world-views of Pacific islanders and Westerners are so radically different. The observations below are mostly still as relevant as they were twenty years ago. [The original posting remains on my old website, here].

1. Introduction

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is where we all hope to be on that expansive Friday evening when the curtain comes down for the last encore. There they are, that motley collection from history, lounging over their drinks, singing, weeping, roaring with laughter, for what else can you do when there are to be no tomorrows? So this, Earth Mother, is why we put up with those damned foreigners for countless millennia : the privilege of a seat in Luigi’s Galactic Cafe on a spaceship escaping to oblivion.

In the meantime, a few tens of millennia back in Milky Way’s time warp, you and I still have to scheme for tomorrow. This discussion paper is one Australian’s unvarnished view of his neighbourhood. If it wounds a tender spot here and there, call the writer a fool and chalk up a debt against him for drinks at the last gasp in Luigi’s. But try to find an idea or two in here as well, for if we stop communicating this vibrant planet will be a dead planet long before the musicians take a bow.

Continue reading →

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52. Performance-Linked Micro-Tariffs

Posted on August 24, 2011 by thormay

The letter following was addressed to Prime Minister Keating, 8 July 1995, and later posted on my website (http://thormay.net/politics/politic5.html). The reply to me from a minder was what you might expect: vapid. Nevertheless the points outlined remain germane to any Australian government. Why have I resurrected it here? Well occasionally web page statistics show up something interesting. Somebody has been accessing the article. Curious, I checked and was immediately struck by the relevance of “performance-linked micro-tariffs” to Australia’s economy in 2011. What do you think?

Dear Prime Minister,

Your government does not have my confidence on the matter of tariffs. You won’t get to read this, being a busy person, but with luck an economist somewhere will put the following arguments into a computer. For the record, here is the main reason for my disquiet, and a couple of suggestions.

1. The Government has lost the plot on macro-economic policy. Specifically, it needs to get sophisticated about the ancient contest between free trade and protection. A binary mind-set on this matter is as naive as a so-called left/right distinction in political belief. There have been good reasons to demolish blanket tariff barriers over the last two decades. There are now compelling reasons to gradually establish what I will call “performance-linked micro-tariffs” in selected sectors of Australian industry.  Continue reading →

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51. Getting It Done – An Echo from the Philippines

Posted on August 13, 2011 by thormay

On a stopover in Manila a while back, I wandered into a bookshop, looking for something that could give me a fix on “the” cultural mindset of the Philippines. This is a country with which I have had only brief contact. It was a silly aim, like picking up one of those books with a title like “Inside China” or “Understanding Australia, the Lucky Country” or “Secrets of the Roman Empire”. What you always get is a caricature, an accident of some writer’s meetings and prejudices, even if it is a pretty caricature. But probably that’s all we get out of life anyway. You have to start somewhere. In this case, I picked up a volume called “Becoming a Guru”, which turned out to be an elite insider’s wry view of administration in the Philippines. His core theme was the pervasive failure of “implementation” in the Philippines, as opposed to grand plans and announcements. The author was one Dr Ramon Katigbak, whom I thought of writing to in order to probe a little more deeply. Unfortunately, he had just passed away. I wrote my unaddressed letter anyway, with a narrative seeping out that had less to do with the Philippines directly than with the cussedness of human management generally – a favourite personal topic that if gifted with an ounce of common sense, I would have put aside years ago in favour of wine, women and song.
Continue reading →

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50. Why Write A PhD?

Posted on July 13, 2011 by thormay

note: here are further articles dealing with the research process and the connundrums of PhD study : Pissing On Every Lamp Post : the paradox of scholarship; The Doctor’s Dilemma – Reading versus Active Experience; How To Get The Degree You Want, or Are You A Fake?; withrawal from PhD candidacies (Thor May) in 1988 & 1996;letter of PhD completion from the University of Newcastle, 2010;dissertation, Language Tangle, 2010; some references from other writers are at the end of this piece. Why Write A PhD? is duplicated on http://thormay.net here

Most of the discussion here was written to myself in 2009. It was done as I finished off what was to finally be the doctoral dissertation which one particular assembly of examiners and university administrators felt that they were able to accept. Their imprimatur would perhaps influence my public credibility, for what that was worth.  That is, whatever else I wrote or said might have a higher standing in the future for those within the academic sub-culture. Of course, I myself did not change a whit (not even in terms of ego enlargement). It was also crystal clear that the greatest number of fellow humans found the term “PhD” or “Doctor of Philosophy” either entirely meaningless or a fresh cause for treating its owner with suspicion. My cultural roots were after all in Australia, a spot famous for swaggering anti-intellectualism. The ultimate Australian put-down is to call someone a “know all”. There is never a shortage of  “know-nothing” characters ready to cut any likely “know all” off at the knees. Oddly, the know-nothings become quite timid when faced with actual, complex problems themselves. ( These Australian cultural habits can clash violently with the East Asian approach, where people think it is polite and morally right to “give face” to the other guy). Coming out of the Australian soup, my own engagement with the whole doctoral enterprise had always been ambivalent, even at the end, and some flavour of that self-doubt may be evident below. I have published the document because others are at this moment going through the torturous process of wondering about their commitment to writing a PhD. This may help them to crystallize their ideas, whether or not they agree with the sentiments I express.

1. Are PhD’s Really Original?

The internal rules in universities rules which define a PhD invariably say that it must be an original contribution to human knowledge. Ground breaking dissertations have indeed been written from time to time. In fact though, few PhDs amount to some grand, original contribution to human knowledge. Many dissertations do include fresh assemblies of data, which may or may not be useful to someone. However, the interpretation of the data found within these documents is rarely original, except in a trivial sense.  Continue reading →

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47. The Contest for Competence

Posted on January 15, 2009 by thormay

If some people don’t break the rules sometimes, then a normal society will cease to function. Breaking the wrong rules for the wrong reasons is like breaking legs though. And if everyone breaks the rules, then a society will disintegrate. A paradox? Yes. See how this cake is baked…

The vector in play is the scarce resource of competence. Most people doing most things are marginally competent at best, and this is in every area of human activity, taken in its aggregate. Any given individual may be good at one thing – cooking, music, his job, whatever – but the aggregate of people doing any of those activities will be indifferently capable. In fact, a significant number will be seriously incapable, and they may do damage out of proportion to their numbers. There will be a small number who are brilliant at this particular thing.

The scarcity of competence holds true in even the best educated societies and professions (e.g. doctors), but overall the balance will be more negative in those communities where education is devalued and opportunity is not equal. Continue reading →

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37. Some Mysteries of Language Learning

Posted on May 2, 2005 by thormay

An expert is a fool a thousand miles from home. Having successfully failed to learn about nine languages, I’m a veteran language learning imbecile, always a thousand miles from success, and an eternally hopeful beginner. I’ve also had the cheek to teach my native language to hopeful novices for thirty years, which sometimes leads them and others to mistake me for a wannabe guru. Hence the following.

[illustration courtesy of Dr Phap Dam who unlike me made a successful transition into the world of another language.] ___________________________________________________________

Hi Thor,

I would like to talk about your analogy of playing chess/football in connection to learning a foreign language; (Observations on the AMES Certificate in Spoken and Written English )

First let me tell you that I used to live among Indonesian overstayers in Wellington. One had managed to survive for many years (maybe 10 years) working at McDonald’s kitchen undetected by the immigration. So it is the equivalence of “having played chess/football” for many years in terms of foreign language learning. And yes, undeniably, he could make himself understood by speaking English, not Indonesian, in his working environment.   Continue reading →

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32. A Harvest of Souls – Talking to Those Other Fools

Posted on November 6, 2004 by thormay

“They had the information, but not the knowledge” – David Ignatius in the IHT, discussing information overload in the CIA; 30 October 2001

Common wisdom on the networks is that George Bush won the 2004 American election by harvesting the souls of America’s lumpen proletariat. This was made possible because almost alone amongst Western democracies, America has a large committed religious constituency, and any constituency, whether it be for religion, football or collecting bottle tops, is a honeypot for the politically ambitious.

There is a kind of self-evident truth about the political potency of religion in America. However, I think it is a surface truth which misses some underlying insights. Are ordinary American people really so different from ordinary European or Australian people? Yes, these Americans are famously ignorant of the wider world. They are insular in their ideas, but polite to strangers. They are quickly offended, and ruinously litigious. They are spectacularly self-indulgent with their diets, lifestyles and the prolifigate use of material resources. These characteristics may be extreme, but none are unique. The preceding description could fit any number of my Australian countrymen.

Indeed, Australians have also just re-elected a conservative government. As in Bush’s America, that government was essentially elected by so-called middle and lower class people even though the declared and covert policies of the government arguably run counter to the interests of the working electorate. Australia is not a country given to overt religion : about 15% of people go to church regularly, and the towns are dotted with empty churches (like much of Europe).

Bush did indeed use the religious electorate, but was that his secret weapon? I think not – not at base. The instrument used so effectively by Bush, and by his Australian alter ego, Howard, was the latent anti-intellectualism which permeates much of both cultures. In the American case, the Bushites were able to marry anti-intellectualism to a faith based movement. Faith corrupts, and absolute faith corrupts absolutely. Bush and Howard were utterly mendacious in manipulating anti-intellectualism as a populist weapon, but that is not the point.

The point is that anti-intellectualism is not equally available in all cultures for political misuse. There are parts of contemporary Europe and elsewhere where it is not a social handicap to be known as someone with an exceptionally efficient brain. There are places where individuals who challenge accepted wisdom are not considered cultural lepers and political traitors.
Continue reading →

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30. The End of War

Posted on September 12, 2004 by thormay

In 1066 William the Conqueror hacked down a few British natives and did a neat takeover job on merry England. He wasn’t the first or the last to throw the dice for glory like this. These days his kind is best kept amused by building, raiding, marrying and betraying those virtual kingdoms known as business corporations. The teeming hordes of career officers and foot soldiers, whose sexual fantasies are met by serving some other master, are also corralled behind the corporate logos of companies great and small.

The remaining testosterone of the swaggering male is mostly mopped up in a hardy trek between the fridge and TV couch, as vicarious heroes slog it out in mass spectator sports, and cinematic muscle-men practice mass slaughter in Hollywood or its badge-engineered TV studio clones from Shanghai to Buenos Aires to Timbuktu. The shadow of female aggression half overlays the male version, like a Venn diagram, and half arcs into its own silk and frilly version of sexual conquest, competition and exploitation.
Continue reading →

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28. The Case for Favoritism

Posted on July 12, 2003 by thormay

Imagine the perfect meritocracy. Now think again. In our perfect meritocracy prizes go to the most able, the most worthy, the best … But who is to decide the most able, worthy or best ? A fair system you say, innocent of human bias, objective in its evaluation.

That’s nice. How many fair systems do you know? Well, there are some admirably equal decision processes in science and technology. A thermometer is pretty fair about measuring the temperature, and a binary calculator separates zeroes and ones reliably.

Consider human affairs. Have you ever seen a fair examination? Well, the ‘fairness’ here is relative to your criteria, isn’t it. If the exam measures what the teacher taught, and the student answers what the teacher asked, then we might say (in some cases) that the exam was fair. But what if the teaching was inadequate or the teacher was misinformed? Or what if the student was smarter than the teacher, and the teacher had trouble admitting that? Rare, you say. No, as a teacher for 27 years in many venues, I have to say that it is extremely common, even the norm. Hmm, what happened to our meritocracy here? We wind up with “brilliant” students who in fact are models of conformity, while some of the really clever students (as well as any number of genuine failures of course), are sent down the waste disposal chute. Continue reading →

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27. How to Get The Degree You Want, OR Are You A Fake?

Posted on June 6, 2003 by thormay

Two topics are put through the mincer here. The preliminary sections are a discussion about the nature, meaning and value of academic qualifications. The second part (the original posting) puts a spotlight on one university (Greenwich University, Hawaii) which actually disappeared, leaving its graduates stranded. I was one of the victims. The great gawking public of course cares little for collapsing institutions but has an endless appetite for personal scandal, so affected individuals usually head for deep cover. I thought it was more useful to let the sun shine in since I’ve always been allergic to anything that looked like a conventional career anyway.

Some related matters are also covered elsewhere on this Internet site, Pissing On Every Lamp Post: the paradox of scholarship; The Doctor’s Dilemma – Reading versus Active Experience; Why Write a PhD?; withdrawal from PhD candidacies (Thor May, letter) in 1988 & 1996;letter of PhD completion from the University of Newcastle, 2010;dissertation, Language Tangle, 2010 Articles from this website are gradually also being copied to a blog called Thor’s Unwise Ideas

Continue reading →

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26. So You Wanna’ Write a Poem??

Posted on June 1, 2003 by thormay

When he was not subverting the youth of Korea with crackpot ideas, from 2000-2004 Thor got to be ‘Writings Manager’ of Pusanweb, and thereby could sometimes crush the fragile hopes of other dreamy poets. Occasionally the poets bit back….

One of the perks being an editor, however humble, is that you can pretend to play God. Of course, it’s tough if no one comes to the temple, but if a stray does wander into your compound from time to time you have a licence to dispense advice from on high. Some time ago one of these mendicants not only came to the gates of Pusanweb, but *asked* for a critique. We watched as he carefully unwrapped his little bundle from a scarlet kerchief, and spread it out on the dirt floor before our altar. It was given with a good heart, we could see. But we sighed. That sigh of a god who is sick to death of gifts of chicken feathers, and milk, and honey. Should we tell him? Damn it all man, we want GOLD ……

Continue reading →

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16. Individualism or the Group ?

Posted on March 1, 2001 by thormay

Other articles dealing with cross-cultures: “Cultural Operating Systems – Thoughts on Designing Cultures”, 2010; Ethnicity and Racism – Stirring the Pot, 2005; “Senate Inquiry into the Status of Australian Expatriates”, 2004;”Korean, American and Other Strange Habits – You Do It Your Way – two books reviewed”, 2003; “When Is It Rude To Be Rude? – Politeness Across Cultures and Subcultures”, 2001; “The Price of Freedom – an Escape from Vietnam”, 1984

The lady on BBC radio was making a pitch to teach social anthropology to the unwashed masses of the air-waves. There is, she said, a range of cultural types whose two extremes are individualism and groupism. And the collocations of these types are selfish and cooperative respectively.

Yeah, well she surely defined her own type : the academic repeater. Like the booster units in high tension electricity transmission cables, the academic repeater picks up the accepted half-truths of the age and and amplifies them to the world as golden rules…

The particular half-truth the BBC lady propagated is insidious, for it is the foundation of countless false stereotypes widely held, even by well-meaning people. Particularly by well-meaning people. The pseudo-scientific propagation of unchallenged ideas becomes really damaging when some academic builds a career on “studies” which support the favoured proposition. With social phenomena it is fairly easy to construct a selective “research study” which will support almost any theory. Often the process is less malicious than lazy, and this is probably the case with the notions in question here.

However, if we deconstruct these assertions of “individualistic” and “group oriented” cultures in the hard light of real world experience, well suddenly the implications assumed for those labels begin to melt away, or blend and change in unexpected ways.
Continue reading →

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11. The Conundrum of Men and Women: Innovators & Imitators

Posted on May 14, 2000 by thormay

[related stories: Gender Puzzle / The Inside Track on Happiness / Fountain of Youth / Letter to an Imaginary Lady .. ]

Yin and yang, the warrior and nurturer, hard and soft, strong and weak, men and women. How hard we tried to persuade ourselves that they were one. Repulsed by the petrified shells of old cultures with their stereotypes and rigid role models, we declared ourselves free. Earnestly we searched for the perfect partner of equal qualities. Searched so long in vain.

Out in the backblocks of unreconstructed macho males and pumpkin scone women they never had a problem. They played the eternal seasons of struts and giggles, infatuated romance, white weddings, bawling babies, economic drudgery, drink and abuse, spreading waistlines, kitchen divorce and dad’s shed up the backyard. Was it so different, after all, from some middle-eastern religious proscription on the genders? Continue reading →

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10. Teaching as a Subversive Activity

Posted on April 22, 2000 by thormay

We all dwell in an unstable buzz of molecules. Some of these atomic tides have become stable enough for a while, and recursive enough in their relationships, to somehow generate that sense of “I”, the identity which allows us to view other assemblies as entities of greater or lesser relevance to the preservation of “I”.

We classify these other entities, and their relationship with self, on a scale from solids to photons, and from embedded conviction to diaphanous hope. At some hard to pin down, but robust perimeter of certainty, we declare all within to be our system of knowledge and being. Within all elements must harmonize, or at least develop protective shells of mutual ignorance, like pearls cohabiting blindly within our living oyster. And having settled upon this system of knowledge, for better or for worse, we become immensely protective of it. It is, after all, US, and all which threatens it threatens US. Continue reading →

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5. The Art of Disproportion

Posted on December 19, 1998 by thormay

Every writer creates a pattern of disproportions. The proportionate is that checkerboard of nights and days within which our lives are governed, the routine of sleep, how you part your hair, when you check for your mail, the trips to the shop that you make when bread or vegetables run out, the people you encounter at the bus stop, what you say to the lady you see on Thursdays. Words, though, in their nature are disproportionate against the proportion of experience. This note itself is a caricature.

So how does a writer differ from the language makers all around him, the cacophony of chatterers? By writing a symphony. The disproportions of our conversation are artless, for where there are patterns they are unconscious, and where there is significance, it is selfish. The writer is able to create patterns of disproportion which create newly defined significance. He marshals the trivia of random occurrence into an enterprise with purpose and direction, just as a musician marshals noise into music.

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#2-1998 EDINN : Re-spinning Intellectuals into the Social Order

Posted on November 29, 1998 by thormay

1. What is an intellectual anyway?

Intellectuals as a sub-species rate somewhat lower than garden spiders in the public estimation (they are not useful, they can sting if you pick them up, and they are economically valueless). Maybe it is necessary to sort this confusion out before we go on to finding them a place in the social fabric.

The common attitude was neatly encapsulated in a piece Paul Johnson wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 1987 (reprinted on 24th May 1987 in The Australian). This claimed to put intellectuals in their place. “Most intellectuals”, wrote Mr. Johnson, ” profess to love humanity and to be working for its improvement and happiness, … but it is the idea of humanity that they love, rather than the actual individuals which compose it. The consequences can be less than thoughtful.” It seemed to me that Mr. Johnson was being less than thoughtful, or rather making  quid out of a prejudice universally exploited by populist politicians for millennia. I wrote a short riposte to the newspaper: Continue reading →

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1. The Human Mind as an Error-Checking Mechanism

Posted on April 12, 1998 by thormay

“On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.”
[John Donne, 1572-1631]

It is time somebody invented the electron theory of truth. Perhaps it could go something like this. Human minds come with a variety of different valencies, although no one has yet devised a periodic table of their range. The simplest fellow, like a hydrogen atom with its single shell electron, holds that one truth stands for all worldly and other-worldly experiences. More complex souls have a varying number of truth (electron) shells, and although their consciousness may habitually dwell at a fairly intimate level, say the behaviour of a spouse, with sufficient heat and agitation, their attention (hence their judgement) may jump to an outer shell of national affairs, or to the dizzy distance of humankind. A few relatively eccentric human types may scarcely ever access their inner shells of intimacy with the laser light of mind.

I am encouraged in these speculations by the stunning lack of interest most people evince in evidential proof which does not relate to their normal attention levels and perceived immediate interests. For example, nowadays I pay the rent (barely) by working as an evening telesalesperson, flogging a pen set at an outrageous price and fraudulently in the name of a charity (which actually receives 6%). This is the world of the salesman, where truth is contracted to the immediate goal of securing a sale. I hear from the booths all around me the insouciant lies of a sales contest. They are earnest, genuine, and wholly promiscuous. Once won, the customer like a fallen woman, loses all respect. I hear myself lying, and try to rationalize by securing the largest number of cash donations, which do actually go to the charity (and are little valued by the employer and “team leaders”).
Continue reading →

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