Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
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Saturday, February 04, 2006
We three kings of Orient are; Bearing gifts we traverse afar, Field and fountain, moor and mountain, Following yonder star. Star reporter of th'Independent Fisk with royal beauty bright Heart so bleeding, Bin Laden heeding Guide us to thy pefect light Born a King on Bethlehem's plain Gold I bring to crown Him again But I can't find Him, 'cos - Hell's bells! Fiskie led me somewhere else. - In his book The Great War for Civilisation, Robert Fisk placed Jesus' birthplace as Jerusalem. Sheesh, anyone can make a mistake. Let's just be grateful that it was made by the seven-times winner of the British Press Award for International Journalist of the Year. If someone less deeply immersed in the history and culture of the peoples of the Middle East - George W. Bush, for instance - were to make such an error, the Independent would never let us hear the last of it. (Via this review by Efraim Karsh, found via Instapundit. The original We Three Kings words and tune can be found here.) Irrefutable. On discussing this with a friend of mine, she reminded me that she had earlier suggested that maybe aliens were putting implants into the ear. I did not remember her saying this. Although it made sense - if they put them in the nose, why not in the ear?(Found by Rob Hinkley and recorded in his Sporadic Chronicle.) Friday, February 03, 2006
The Battle Cry of Freedom. As promised, JEM takes the debate on this blog about the industrial revolution and slavery forward another step. He writes: "ARC thinks my industrial revolution explanation for the demise of slavery is chronologically impossible. "The short answer is that ARC's thesis is even more chronologically impossible than mine, as after the supposed medieval end to the practice, it was still there hundreds of years later for the industrial revolution to terminate. In any case, the distinction between slavery and serfdom is more in the name than the actuality, at least so far as the serf/slave is concerned. And serfdom/slavery never died away among our Medieval African, Middle-eastern and Slav neighbours in any case -- all of whom we did indeed have considerable contact with. Incidentally, in these days Europe was not roughly comparable but far behind China in technology. And China did not lack serfs/slaves either. "But the clincher is that the reason for the demise of serfdom at least in western Europe is well-known: it was the black death. That was the event that at the time, led to such a drastic shortage of labour and hence increase in its value that it made the medieval feudal system, with its serf-cum-slave based economy, untenable. Yet another example of an unintentional father of moral events, if I may say so. "The black death, and then the industrial revolution: twice now, slavery has been destroyed by accident. The first time it was locally, the second it was ultimately globally or almost so. "ARC mentions capitalism. I did not until now. But that is an interesting path not yet followed here: the place of capitalism and socialism in this matter. Not for nothing did Hayek call his classic work on the dangers of socialism, "The Road to Serfdom". You see, I would add as another unconscious nail in the coffin of slavery, the development after the black death of the first modern banking system, leading to accumulation of vast private and corporate wealth and the emergence of capitalism as we know it, leading in turn to the triangular trade... "Let 'Lorenzo the Magnificent' be the Battle Cry of Freedom! "But I did mention economics. The point of both the black death and the industrial revolution is that they caused slavery to cease to be economically viable. It is of course wrong to imagine that slavery is some sort of free good to the slave owner, any more than running an animal farm is cost-free to the farmer. Slavery died away when the cost of owning and feeding and housing and controlling and working a slave became more expensive than employing a free man or using a machine. "It was and is as simple as that. Morality, I'm afraid, had nothing to do with it. That was bolted onto an inevitable event by immoral(?) moralists, quick to see an opportunity to make a fast morality buck... no, that's not fair either. They were simply reflecting the reality of the world they lived in. Morality, in this context, had become a sort of fungible good. - JEM." 'Let them google "luxury car" and the Chinese revolution will come.' I, like many other bloggers, have slagged off Google's decision to cooperate with the Chinese censors. Turkeyblog presents the contrary case very persuasively. The Soviet Union didn't fall because people were angry that they couldn't read the Declaration of Independence. It fell because the people couldn't find decent food or housing but had been exposed to the idea of a world where these were plentiful. Where poor people often still had cars and everybody expected at least three choices of each item in the supermarket. Where rich people might be evil or terrible, but at least they didn't haul away your family and stuff in the dead of night (usually).I can't go all the way with this. The... background knowledge? unstated premise? paradigm? that the principles behind the Declaration of Independence had something to do with all that abundance also played a role. Where people see the abundance without cottoning on to that paradigm, what you get is not liberation but envy. Nonetheless Mr Barto is on to something: In every way, Google is about creating a world where the individual at the keyboard makes choices and comes to expect that the things he or she wants will at least in the internet domain probably be available. As I say, I don't care if you can't use Google in China to find out how bad the government is. If you can find out about the stuff Americans, Europeans and the Japanese take for granted, you can figure that out.In a similar vein Brian Micklethwait argued that blogs allowed China to develop and celebrate a "private" tone of voice. A rare and beautiful quality. The late Sir John Cowperthwaite was a man who did great good in the world by not messing about with things he did not understand. "Arise, Sir Rowan, defender of our liberties." Unlikely, I grant you, at least while Mr Blair compiles the Honours List, but he'd deserve it better than three-quarters of those that get it. Thursday, February 02, 2006
Test case. I push the uttermost limits of free speech over at Samizdata. Once I had thought of that post I felt compelled to write it. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water... Norm of That Blog on the good and harm done by religion. Sorry. Sorry. Couldn't stop myself. I'm off that stuff really, you know that. But JEM says, "The correspondence is closed." Accepted, in general.Awww, since you asked so nicely... JEM's email then goes on to offer some new arguments in that debate. I can't post them now because it would take too much time to do that annoying business with the lines and right now I have to surrender this computer to a rival user. But stay tuned. Stakhanovite schools. Patrick Crozier has some thoughts about government lying about school league tables an' stuff. He writes:
Read the rest. My thought: why am I not reading TheWelfareStateWe'reInBlog every day? Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? (1 Corinthians 1: 20) Not everybody's going to like that as a final word but it's my blog, so tough. "This correspondence," as the editor of the Times used to say, "is now closed." Religion and Science reference post. The date on this is false. I have moved it a few days into the future so that it stays at the top. So keep scrolling down, there may be new stuff since you last looked. [Added later: the debate having caught up with the "future", I've now put in a final CLEARANCE SALE, EVERYTHING MUST GO!!!! timestamp onto this reference post of one minute to midnight (GMT) on Wednesday 1 February. In the broader sense this debate will go on to until either the heat death of the universe or the Last Trump, but this corner of it will take a break at 11.59pm Wednesday. Getting this much mail is intimidating. I feel the need for less weighty thoughts. I shall, however, order What Is Good? from Amazon - but I'm hoping it mostly says, "Cheesecake."] Professor Grayling's Times piece from Feb 2004, The Reason of Things. My post from two days later, criticising it. My Jan 2006 post containing Prof. Grayling's email that he sent me when a correspondent alerted him to my old post, and my thoughts in reply. ARC on Gottglaubigers, and Burke's view that the perpetrators of evil use whatever pretext "sells" at that time. Reader A on question-begging the wrongness of religion as one its evils. JEM on technology as the unintentional father of moral events (a quotable line!) and the industrial revolution as the cause of slavery's demise. Reader B says history is everything that ever happened including unrecorded acts of religiously-inspired benevolence or forebearance. The failure of religion to control evil is the root problem, Randy argues. Moira Breen says that deleting religion won't debug human nature, and is concerned for my Martian readers. There are yet more emails waiting in my in-box, but I haven't the time to post them now. Are you guys sure you wouldn't rather discuss Stressful Events in Sewing instead? The world has not yet heard the full truth about my upside-down net curtain. Yet more added on 30 Jan, and more to come. Two more from JEM, one answering a possible objection to his views of what ended slavery, and one replying to Reader B. With only a few hours to go I have added a few more emails, including a big one from ARC. For some computer reason I cannot yet see my most recent posts on the web, even though I know from experience that most of you can. So no permalinks yet. UPDATE: Here is ARC's reply. European slavery had died out for the first time before the industrial revolution was ever thought of, he says. "One God Further." I checked back over the last Britblog roundup, which took place while I was hating my computer. I found that Talk Politics had issued a polemical defence of Richard Dawkins' recent polemical attacks on religion. There is plenty relevant to our present debate. (53 minutes remaining.) One thing I learned there was that one Dr R. David Muir from the Evangelical Alliance told Channel Four that the Christians ought to get a "substantial right of reply." Get real, man. You have plenty more to lose than Channel Four does if ever that "right" becomes enshrined in law, as our masters would love it to be. They'd love to put a price on "free" speech; the price being paid in being forced to use your printing presses and your pulpits to propagate replies containing messages you find wrong or evil. The surrender monkeys are on this side of the channel. So far as I know no British newspaper has imitated the courageous action of France-Soir. UPDATE: That didn't last long. (Bad news via Samizdata comments.) Repeated humiliating surrenders can sometimes have the paradoxical effect of stiffening the will to resist in the long run, by making the situation clear. The question is, how long is the long run? I'd call it the Munich Effect, had not the torch of free speech in this case been taken up by a German newspaper. Go Die Welt. A shorter reply to Reader B is offered by JEM, who quotes, Matthew 7:20 in the King James Authorised Edition: By their fruits ye shall know them. He adds, "I tend to agree with the old fellow I once met in Texas who reckoned if the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus to use himself, there was no call for any fancy new version." A very apt quote, and it was used aptly by Professor Grayling in his original article, but if one agrees with ARC's argument that Reader B was playing a cover version, so to speak, of that article (i.e. saying that if one can define science as only the pursuit of truth then one can equally define Christianity as only the imitation of Christ)... then I think we're back where we started. Whose fruits have fallen where? That old fellow in Texas had a British cousin who once offered a museum a coin from the time of Julius Caesar. You could tell it was genuine because it bore the date 55BC. Hegemonic discourse. Random Jottings says that the debate on this blog is couched wholly in secular terms. Things that render life more worth living and more beautiful are, he says, being excluded from the argument. Slavery had already died out once before the industrial revolution was ever thought of. ARC responds... 1) To JEM: "JEM's contention that the industrial revolution, not a conscious campaign, destroyed slavery, is a common idea but I think it is chronologically impossible. As I remarked in my first post, "the idea that slavery was wrong all over the world was only able to be propounded because it had already been abolished at home by a long historical process within a Christian culture." Strict slavery vanished from England circa 1100. Its milder cousin, serfdom, died over the next three centuries or so. Thus by the middle of the past millenium - 1500 or so - you have a society that
"In this society, the majority of the people were living at a technical level that would not have surprised their counterparts in the Roman empire (the central heating arrangements would certainly have seemed inferior, probably also the baths) but nonetheless functioned well enough without slavery. The steam engine, and the whole technical apparatus it represents, appears far too late to be the cause of this absence of slavery. Several authors (I recall that Thomas Sowell is one) have pointed out that western society did not become free because it was rich. It became rich because it was free. "At the other end of the timeline (as JEM has noticed in his second post, but does not, I feel, draw the correct conclusions), capitalism certainly coexisted with slavery at times. The abolition of the slave trade was certainly not in the UK's economic interest at the time it happened and the antebellum south fitted very well into the mid-Victorian economic system. You can argue that economic trends would eventually have created economic arguments for sweeping slavery away. A conversation held just before the war started between Judge Campbell (southern) and Seward (northern; he was Lincoln's rival for the Republican nomination and later his secretary of state), reached agreement that slavery would reach its maximum extent in the US in 25 years and be on the way out for economic reasons within 50 years, therefore there was no need for a war over it. Even if you accept their long-term analysis (and their assumption that the slaves can just be patient for two generations in the general interest of avoiding war!), the conclusion is that slavery was not against the _immediate_ economic interests of capitalism. "Thus I think that both the order of events and the economics indicate that capitalism is the servant, not the master here. It gives the western world the power to enforce its view of slavery on the world. It does not give the western world its view of slavery. If slavery had not become unknown in England long before technology began to make a real difference to the lot of ordinary people, then it would never have occurred to them that it was wrong elsewhere - _and_, I am also arguing, they would not have had the industrial revolution and so that technology. In this sense, thefore, there _is_ an incompatibility between slavery and capitalism - but an incompatibility in which cause and effect are reversed. Slavery could (and did) exist happily for millenia, quite untroubled by its theoretical incompatibility with a capitalist system that could not be until slavery was removed. 2) To Prof. Grayling: "Re the professor's response, "The massive and systematic falsity of views to the effect that supernatural agencies operate in the universe with express reference to the lives of human beings on this planet, given in addition that they are so often and widely invoked to direct, dominate and often distort those lives, is scarcely describable in so offhand a way as 'one more tick on the bad side of the scoresheet.' "He _appears_ rather to be missing the point, stated be me and others, that there _is_ no point in including the truth or falsity of a given religion, or a given atheist philosophy, in a debate on the helpfulness or harmfulness of either. That which is false is innately harmful, as I think we all agree. We either then go on to debate its truth or falsehood, or we agree to differ on that and debate whether, in the course of human history, one or another has done more harm in its effects, _apart_ from the fundamental issue of the wrongness of the belief in itself. To give an example, I think Buddhism quite wrong, but I might be persuaded that it has done relatively little positive harm in the large-scale historical sense criticised by Reader B (one might argue for the harm of political inaction - and of couse I agree with Reader B that the personal effects - characters formed, personal principles and happiness acquired, and ultimately souls saved - are important though large-scale history largely ignores them). I also dissent from Islam. That I would find it easy to argue for its having done more harm in the large-scale historical sense is not very relevant to the dissent; maybe on points of fundamental philosophy I dissent more from Buddhism. Your original post critiqued his original argument for the religion having done great harm relative to science, the difference between your views being taken as read. 3) To Grayling and JEM:: "Grayling states that, "The argument that _Communism, an ideology officially dedicated to scientific atheism, has killed more people than all the holy wars and holy tortures ever made_ is a canard that itself deserves the full Natalie Solent treatment of forensic deconstruction. Was it the _scientific atheism_ aspect that prompted the massacre of Kulaks or the starvation of Chinese peasants in the Great Leap Forward, or might it have been the ideology of class war, theories about collectivisation, and the like? Where did Communism learn its lessons about prophets and holy books, orthodoxy and conformity, the putting to death of heretics, and the like again?" "And JEM states that Reader B "contends that the principles of Christianity are more important than their practical application. This is like saying that a scientific theory is perfect but the experimental results don't agree with it, therefore the experiment is wrong. This part of his argument is worse than the first. It does not just get us nowhere, it leads us deeper into the quagmire." "In fact, Reader B, in line with your original reversal of the professor's original argument, was rephrasing his "Science labours towards an understanding of things, testing itself vigorously..." as a similar statement of the abstract purity of Christiantity as defined by its precepts. If one can _define_ science as only the pursuit of truth, and claim that communism was 'really' religious, despite its very vehement claim to be anti-religious and pro-scientific, then one can equally _define_ Christianity as only the imitation of Christ, and dismiss every crusade, every inquisition as 'really' atheistic. There is indeed a sense in which communism looks like a religion, jsut as there is a sense in which the extreme puritans of the 17th century look like atheists, but there is no sense in participating in this argument while taking one view but not the other. "Thus I feel that the professor justifies Reader B and JEM's critique should really be directed at the professor. - ARC" Those rowdly students, protesting again... in favour of animal testing? The Times reports: Pro-Test’s tactics mirror those of animal rights activists, with about 150 students using websites and chat forums to organise protests. What did all the ancient atheists go? "J" writes: ..."can't help wondering what happened to all the atheistic pre-technological societies. People seem to have tried just about every belief system and social organization you can imagine over the last fifty or a hundred thousand years, so you'd think they'd have tried that, too. If religion is really as stupid and counterproductive as all that, there ought be some competitive advantage to be had from getting rid of it -- or at worst, it should be neither here nor there. "So how come the clever atheists didn't wipe out the dumb old God squad and take their stuff? Or just expand peacefully? Or even simply survive? I don't have the slightest clue why not, but the fact that they apparently didn't seems striking." -j (I think many atheists would argue that the modern secular West displays just such a competitive advantage through the superiority of atheism. On the other hand one could argue that the West has lost its oomph along with its religion, and one wouldn't necessarily have to be religious to think that. I gather Charles Murray, who makes that argument in this book I haven't read, isn't. Or one could take the opposite view to Murray's and prefer secular societies while still thinking religion true. - NS. Two more from Professor Grayling. Or rather, one plus a postscript. I'll mentally file them under the heading "the luxury of anonymity", since both touch on that topic. Here is the first email: "Dear Natalie Solent "I managed to glance at some of the emails you mentioned, for which thanks. A comment not on the blogs but on those of the bloggers - chiefly 'Reader A' - who argue ad hominem: robust debate is good, but whether directly or by tone, ad hominem remarks (and I include derogatory references to academics as a class - does this carry residues of career disappointment?) do little to advance matters. In the case of Reader A in particular, whose thought is confused, both the luxury of anonymity and the need to externalise his/her own difficulties with logic might explain the irritation behind the remarks, but surely a well-intentioned interest in getting the issues clear would have no room for this. - Good wishes and again my thanks - Anthony Grayling" He then added, It all started because my husband's family name is rather unusual. When I started blogging he was a supply teacher. That meant he had to get work in a new place every few days. Since I intended to be very rude about the follies of the teaching profession, I thought it best not to have any prospective employer who did a search on his name throwing up umpteen references to me, or to put him in an awkward position in the staff room when he had got work. ("I do hope you are not related to that awful woman!") I do see the point that debate is politer when one has to live with the public consequences of what one has said. The trouble is that these public consequences can take fair or unfair forms. One thing that mitigates against irresponsibility on the part of pseudonymous writers like me is that a long-running pseudonym such as "Natalie Solent" itself acquires a "brand value." (Another, more idiosyncratic reason for adopting a pseudonym is that the real me suffers from a crippling disadvantage: I was frightfully well brought up. I am nice. Much too nice to argue. My response to face to face disagreement with people I don't know well is to apologise for breathing air that someone else might want to use. In order to fulfil my life-potential I simply had to liberate my inner sarcastic cow.) A picture is worth a thousand words. Rob Hinkley of the Sporadic Chronicle compares a Chinese Google image search and a UK Google image search for "Tiananmen Square." Someone once accused me of being Rob Hinkley. If I were Rob Hinkley I'd have thought of doing that. You know those Danish cartoons? Apparently the real ones didn't anger Muslims enough - so some pious hand drew a few extra-annoying ones, some of which were obscene and one of which depicted the prophet Mohammed with the face of a pig - and then circulated them among Muslims claiming that they, too, were among those published by Jyllands-Posten. The BBC included the pig cartoon in its story about the row without indicating it was a fake. This post from "Drinking from Home" has the screenshots. Via Biased BBC's Ed Thomas, who comments, with supporting link, "These things can cause riots, y'know." Monday, January 30, 2006
What did he want to be, God? Nah, this isn't what you think. The BYF, in a quip I wish I'd made, spots an oddity in an account of the Deputy Prime Minister's lingering sense of injustice over failing to get into grammar school. The kindness of strangers. I was intrigued by this story from the Times. Riffat Pasha alleges that she was virtually imprisoned by her husband's family, and that she only escaped by leaving the equivalent of the castaway's message in a bottle. The court was told that in July 2004 Mrs Pasha left the note in the women’s lavatory at Atkinsons department store in Sheffield. She wrote on the envelope, begging whoever found it to deliver it to the police or to a doctor who treated her for tuberculosis in hospital.The trial is not over yet, so no speculation from me as to whether her account or that of the defence is the true one. But given that such imprisonments do happen, I am glad that whoever found the note (a woman, presumably) did not dismiss it as a joke or the work of a fantasist. I am also glad that the police are willing to investigate cases like this. I went a-Googling for more about the note which I seem to remember Sun Yat-Sen threw from a grille, having been kidnapped and imprisoned at the Chinese Legation in London, but haven't found much so far. Industrial Revolution and Slavery Part II and On with the game! Two more letters from JEM. (This post originally just had the one, so scroll down if you haven't read the second yet.) In the first letter, JEM revisits his earlier one on the causes of the end of slavery. He writes: "Natalie, "It has been put to me this evening that far from causing the end of slavery, the industrial revolution was financed at least in part by slavery, and that far from ending slavery it led directly to an actual increase in the numbers enslaved. A Google search shows this perspective to be quite popular. "Well it may sound odd but I agree with these two points, so far as they go; however they don't go very far. "Firstly it cannot be denied that the wealth of 18th century Great Britain was to a considerable extent built upon the triangular trade with its notorious middle passage of slaves from west Africa to the Americas, together with the slave-powered sugar and cotton economies of the West Indies and what I'll call 'Dixie' for short. "So yes it was that great wealth and surplus capital, all greatly enhanced by the proceeds of slavery, that made the industrial revolution feasible. Yet this is beside the point although highly ironic, and a classic example of the law of unintended consequences. "Secondly, it is indeed true that the great new water and steam powered cotton mills of England led to a vast growth in the demand for cotton from Dixie, and hence a huge increase in the number of slaves working on the plantations. "Yet this does not alter the fact that in the longer term the industrial revolution made slavery outmoded and ultimately extinct, even when it came to picking cotton. It just did not happen overnight. I never claimed it did. And on the way to it happening, there were times when things got worse again before they got better. "So I stand by my central thesis: the industrial revolution destroyed slavery." - JEM Teasing out the multiple causes of an historical event is fascinating. Which was it that did for slavery, the industrial revolution pushing us to what the Albion's Seedlings team have called "the Exit", the point when production started to pay better than predation - or was it the religiously-inspired political and military campaign cited by me and ARC? I expect everyone here would answer, "both." But there's plenty of arguing to be done about the proportions, and even more about the line of cause and effect. That may well be less a line and more a ping-pong game. - NS In the second letter, JEM responds to Reader B: "As Reader B puts it, "The game of comparing good and bad historical achievements of Christianity is deeply suspect..." but then so is the game of comparing good and bad historical achievements of science, or Freemasonry, or Socialism, or macrame, or anything else you case to mention. However, unlike most alternatives candidates for this treatment playing this game with religion is as you say, kind of fun. "So on with the game! "But first, science: "I have observed earlier that it is mistaken to look upon science as a moral process. The only moral thing about science is the search for truth. All other moral questions are beyond its competence, so I believe that should be the end of Graylings's case, holed below the waterline by a fundamental logical flaw. "So now, religion: "Reader B reminds us of Lewis's observation that history is everything that ever happened. Indeed. And as my physics tutor once pointed out, time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once. Also indeed. These remarks may be technically correct, but get us nowhere. "Then in his [actually her, although JEM had no way of knowing this - NS] Paragraph (2) and indeed again in his Paragraph (3) he contends that the principals of Christianity are more important than their practical application. This is like saying that a scientific theory is perfect but the experimental results don't agree with it, therefore the experiment is wrong. This part of his argument is worse than the first. It does not just get us nowhere, it leads us deeper into the quagmire." -JEM |