"All I'm armed with is research"

I read that on someone's application. Their research statement. If I don't do research I will stop being. I kid thee not. In the teaching statement there are choice quotes by Hubbard, Einstein and Gandhi (cue vomit). Still, after looking at the other 18 robots that applied this one still has something left of a human sensibility..ah, almost became a bit nostalgic there for that old-world word: the human.

The robots: technically brilliant, you're sure. But so what? Really, it's that simple. Trust me, R-ko.

The life of the mind! I've never seen a greater collection of sorry losers. It is never asked whether thought delights the mind, or how this terrible hypertrophy of technical 'knowing' and pseudo-scientific intelligence can be brought back to the most basic and fundamental question: how can I be a good person, how do we lead good lives? Still think that what we learn from our parents and from religion outshines this baloney produced by the university. By some orders of degree.

I've also become somewhat irritated by bookish people. Not just the book club type of adolescents. But book people in general. The type who think that they must swoon over Proust or Penelope Fitzgerald or whoever it may be (art as a substitute for religion?). The 'divine' Ms Fitzgerald. Everyone's got to believe in something so don't knock it. But their addiction to books, the fascination with other people's lives, the desire to not live oneself or find one's own way but instead be absorbed by the details of a fictitious character. 

Over the holidays you met a grown woman (yes, I know, it is hard to believe) who traveled all the way down to London from that forgotten country, the north of England, just to see the studios where some of the Harry Potter films were shot. She was almost bouncing in her seat when she explained to me what this meant..no, do you really understand what this means? Why her husband, a mellow looking maulvi, indulges her is one of those mysteries that are best left unexplained.  

[Writers] gave their blood to phantoms, and they incited their readers to do the 
same: to waste their lives by burying themselves in the lives of others, 
with the aggravating circumstance that these others were neither heroes 
nor saints and, besides, never existed. These remarks can be applied to the 
whole of that universe of dreams which is called "culture": flooded by 
literary opium, siren songs, vampirizing and — to say the least — useless 
production, people live on the fringe of the natural world and its 
exigencies, and consequently on the fringe — or at the antipodes — of the 
"one thing needful." The 19th century — with its garrulous and 
irresponsible novelists, its "poetes maudits ," its creators of pernicious 
operas, its unhappy artists, in short, with all of its superfluous idolatries 

and all of its blind alleys leading to despair — was bound to crash against   a wall, the fruit of its own absurdity; thus the First World War .

Harsh stuff, Frithjof, but, yes, I can see where you're coming from.

Take the oil

It is written, in the period of the kali yuga what was hidden will be revealed.

(From Guenon, The Crisis of the Modern World)

A world of exposure and surface appearances (because there isn't anything deeper).

Okay, this is from just this month: 
1. Moody's 'settlement' $864m
2. Deutsche Bank $630 m 
3. BT accounting scandal
4. Rolls Royce, 671 m (sterling).

Now, what was that story again: I've got some wheat, you've got some butter: let's trade.
Are the wheels, then, coming off? I mean, putting to one side the looming environmental crisis (in the UK over 50% of the wildlife has been destroyed over the last 50 years (Moth Snowstorm); for other startling figures see The Sixth Extinction. All of this is before climate change has really kicked in. It is, rather, population growth, urbanization, intensive farming and the growth of middle class lifestyles).

Putting to one side the very serious issues of escalating mental health problems.

What, then? If Pabst and Milbank are to be trusted, there's a crisis of liberalism: liberal democracy and the liberal economic system that is so bound to it. 

~
Yasser: "When does the world end, then?"
Me: It already has, we're just living in the afterglow.
Yasser: "But when?"
Me: Why should I tell you? So that you can make a killing?

Abundance

"A society of performance is replacing a society of discipline"
--Z. Bauman.

"A gross error it is to think that regal power ought to serve for the good of the body and not of the soul, for men's temporal peace and not their eternal safety; as if God had ordained Kings for no other purpose than to fat up men's souls like hogs and to see that they have their mash.
--Richard Hooker.

There was this line from Thesiger, 'the tougher the conditions, the better the man'. And woman, of course. Paraphrased, of course. From your own relative level of comfort this seems deeply appealing. But I don't think that it's just nostalgia or a false craving for a situation that you, personally, would never be able to endure. What resonates with a lot of people is the artificiality of our wants and desires. Actually, perhaps it doesn't resonate at all and that's precisely the problem? Could it be that in reality we're all quite content either fattened up or dreaming of that state of satiation?

And yet there is always the nagging feeling that the small-scale utopia of limited wants, self-imposed austerity, a republic of needs (Rousseau) allows us to concentrate on the fundamental things in life. Live within yourself, within your means. Don't get ahead of yourself. The heart should follow the foot, the sufis would say.

To modern ears this will, no doubt, sound like a harking back to 'the good ol' days' or, worse, a justification for turning the clock back-if such a thing were possible-to a Talebanesque state of affairs. To those who are liberal minded (or, more accurately, self-proclaimed liberals) it will come across as a clamouring for a return to more conservative times when everyone knew their place (racial purity, class and gender hierarchies), dim-witted small-mindedness (as opposed to the open-mindedness of the cosmopolitan). Isn't Trump, for example, simply a manifestation of a similar longing, a similar distrust of metropolitan elites?

There's a grave danger of relating everything to that great buffoon. But you can see the general point: an end to multiculturalism and a return to simpler times, the undifferentiated conditions of small-town or rural life. 

What is missed in all this? That there's an anarchic possibility in the small-scale option; that a life lived in a particular place, with specific attachments, independent of the state, untouched by the frenzy of the media and market deceptions, is not necessarily a claustrophobic one. In fact, quite the opposite: if there is joy in austerity (Aquinas?) then it can open out to something else, wider vistas. And in contrast, it is restless desire for more and more commodities, 'experiences', that is stifling...a slave of one's desires? Hell hath no limits. The notion that we could possess happiness, time, as if we owned them, had a right to them instead of recognizing them for what they are, pure gifts, is one of the deepest sources of our contemporary illusions.

Abundance, in a different sense -and perhaps one could call it a Qur'anic sense- would mean something quite else: there is enough for everyone right now. Abundance is not a utopian fantasy but a present possibility that is warped by capitalism and the capitalistic mentality. Not only does the system produce inequalities that generate genuine scarcity; it also forces us to think of scarcity exclusively in terms of commodities (Iliich). Furthermore, by setting up the notions of "mine" and "thine" (exclusive property rights) it helps drown out the idea of a common good and the substantive notion of the person that is connected to it. 

K

Towards the end of this stunning album it's as if Cave is singing himself back into the world after going through hell.

Diversity

Mainstream economic models have sacrificed too much realism at the altar of mathematical purity. Their various simplifying assumptions have served aesthetic rather than practical ends. As a profession, economics has become too much of a methodological monoculture. And that lack of intellectual diversity cost the profession dear when the single crop failed spectacularly during the crisis. This monoculture, it is argued, has also narrowed the economics curriculum in universities. This has generated an ever greater focus on the mathematical gymnastics of optimising models and too little focus on the everyday aerobics of how the economy functions. Accompanying this has been neglect of disciplines that abut and illuminate economics: economic history, moral philosophy, money and banking, radical uncertainty, non-rational expectations. In short, neglect of the very things that makes economics interesting and economies important. [xv]

Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, Nov. 2016


Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants of our time.

Robert Skidelsky

Nov. 2016

"When I open my wallet
to show my papers
pay money
or check the time
of a train
I look at your face

The flower`s pollen
is older than the mountains
Aravis is young
as mountains go

The flower`s ovules
will be seeding still
when Aravisthen aged
is no more than a hill.

The flower in the heart`s
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain

And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.

--- John Berger.

R.I.P.

The mountains appear to be solid, are really flowing and will one day float straight out of here ( an old Qur'anic theme). Nothing really lasts. Capstones shift. Even power, which to the untrained eye, seems to be stable, immovable, will fall away and crumble. Which is why resistance and hope must go on.

What lasts for longer is invisible...the spirit, love, friendship. The force- and it isn't a mechanical force- lives through us. By that, he means, we do not possess it. It comes our way, if we're lucky, if we're receptive to it. 

What is the flower in the heart?

Who is the flower...

Our own lives, our own heart, as hard as stone or as ancient as the golden pollen. A receptacle for the appearance of an image, a face. Mine or yours?