In the new issue of Prospect, Roger Scruton responds to the recent spate of atheist polemics from the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Arguing that these books fail to comprehend the human need for the sacred, Scruton draws upon the insights of the “anthropology of religion,” and in particular the French critic René Girard, to argue that religion is not, contra Hitchens et al, the cause of violence, but actually the solution to it. Let us know what you think below.
Monthly Archive for July, 2007
With the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death approaching rapidly, brace yourselves for the next wave of Dianamania—Tina Brown’s recent Diana Chronicles is merely the most high-profile of at least 14 new Diana titles this year. But while Diana’s character flaws or the conspiracy theories surrounding her death continue to enthrall some, perhaps the most interesting question is not about the woman herself, but about the public reaction to her death and what it told us about modern Britain.
For the August issue of Prospect, Andrew Marr and Joan Smith debate whether the “Diana moment” was a change for the better. Yes, says Marr: Diana’s death turned Britain into an emotionally healthier country. No, says Smith: it was the first example of the trend of turning private grief into public spectacle.
Click here to read the debate, and let us know your thoughts on the meaning of the “Diana moment” below.
Albert Ellis, who in the 1950s founded cognitive therapy in the US, died yesterday at home in New York. He was 93. He gave his last interview to Jules Evans, whose portrait of Ellis in this month’s Prospect described a man who remained dedicated to the Stoic values that underpinned his system and to the teaching to which he devoted his life. In his later years, Ellis fell out with the trustees of the institute he founded, who tried to eject him from the board—yet he remained stoical about even this, describing the board members as “fucked-up, fallible human beings, just like everyone else.” You can discuss this article in the comments boxes below.
Orthodox paradox. In 2005, Bartle Bull wrote about the new Iraqi constitution and Noah Feldman, an American law professor who helped to write it (subscribers can read it here). As it turns out, Feldman has personal experience of trying to combine religious tradition and modernity himself, as he reveals in this thoughtful article.
Jews of Iraq. Playwright (and former Prospect cultural editor) Samantha Ellis reviews two recent books by Marina Benjamin and Naim Kattan in the Jewish Quarterly.
Klezmer Idol. Don’t forget to vote in the Jewish Chronicle competition.
As the spectre of a European constitution treaty is once again raised, Gordon Brown’s ascendancy to the premiership has breathed new life into the old, and mildly musty, question of whether Britain needs a written constitution. Harriet Harman, deputy Labour leader, and Jack Straw, the minister responsible for constitutional affairs, have in recent months both come out in favour of a written document, and Brown himself has made favourable noises. Anthony Barnett, the founder of the pressure group Charter 88 which campaigns for a written constitution, is optimistic.
In the June issue of Prospect, Robert Hazell, director of the Constitution Unit, was sceptical about the need for a written constitution, arguing that there was little public demand for such a huge project, and that it would do “nothing” to restore public trust in the political process. But a month later, David Marquand responded that the piecemeal reform of the Blair years had led to a clumsy “ad hoc miscellany,” and that the only way to fix Britain’s broken constitution was to write it down in one place.
What might such a document look like? Earlier this year, Vernon Bogdanor, constitutional expert and professor of government at Oxford, convened a seminar at which students attempted to draw together the constitutional elements of current British law into a single document. This “constitution of the United Kingdom” was published by the Smith Institute—click here [PDF] and scroll down to page 152 to read it.
Has Prospect’s July cover story, “Gordon Brown: intellectual,” started a mini-trend for attributing intellectual depths to politicians? In Monday’s Independent, Bruce Anderson claimed that David Cameron, too, is an intellectual. “He has read and thought a great deal about politics and about the human condition,” Anderson writes. Other evidence for the proposition? “It must be remembered that Mr Cameron got a first at Oxford without being a slave to his books.”
Reading between the lines, we can see a contrast being implied between two intellectual types: on the one hand the bookish, “clunking” and “solipsistic” son of the manse; on the other the well-bred “son of the old rectory” who, in the best traditions of English upper-class effortlessness, breezed through Oxford, barely troubling to read a book, and still emerged with a first. But there is a big difference between being clever and being an intellectual. Cameron may be the first—but is he the second? Even Anderson seems to half-acknowledge that his case is pretty weak. His final sentence reads: “Mr Cameron must prove that he has intellectual weight.”
Last week, to great fanfare in the world of Artificial Intelligence, it was announced that the game of checkers (better known as draughts in the UK) had been solved by the University of Alberta’s Chinook project—the most complex game at which a computer has ever become unbeatable. As some commentators have observed, even God could only draw a game against Chinook, something that may seem slightly alarming, or even blasphemous, to amateur theologians.
Today is another interesting day for AI, as it sees the most sophisticated poker-playing programme yet developed taking on two of the world’s finest human players in an eagerly-anticipated face-off. The humans, here, are clear favourites—machines have yet to demonstrate skills at the “soft” science of bluffing that can match our own. But for how much longer will we be able to win any games against the machines?
The ancient game of Go is a widely-cited example of the current limits of AI. Computers may be able to play chess at a higher level than any human in history, but they’re barely as good as a decent amateur at Go. This is partly due to the size of the playing-board (a massive 19 by 19 squares) and the open-endedness of game strategy (there are a possible 361 opening moves, and up to 300 options on every subsequent turn), but it’s also a more intangible business, related to the difficulty of articulating Go strategy as anything more precise than “play lots of Go.” This will certainly change, but it’s an important reminder of the ways in which AI remains limited: its problems need to be precisely quantified by humans.
Rather like a martial art, in fact, Go mastery is considered to be a business of submission as much as of active engagement; even more so than in chess, there is no substitute for the intuition developed by viewing thousands upon thousands of games, and by studying the hundreds of years of tradition surrounding shapes and strategies. The ranking system itself is graded through 30 diminishing levels of kyu (級,급)—where 30 is a beginner, and 1 is pretty good—before you reach the eight “amateur” dans (段,단) and then, finally, the nine “professional” dans. Only in recent years have any true Go masters emerged from continents other than Asia; but no computer programme has yet even achieved a dan ranking.
Go is a massive challenge, but it is also a finite one, and for this reason alone it seems likely that the human upper hand will not endure. Then tenth dan itself is a hypothetical rank, that of the perfect player. No human will ever reach it. One day, however, it is almost certain that a machine will.
What is it about reading groups? Never done anything to hurt anyone, but still a regular target for insult. Columnists sneer at an imagined coffee klatsch of middle-aged women, while authors veer between gratitude and suspicion. Earlier this year, Zadie Smith described the reading group as the enemy of the individual reader, a delivery mechanism for a conformist culture of ‘system reading’.
Contrary evidence doesn’t seem to dent the prejudice. A study by Jenny Hartley showed that reading groups vary enormously in make-up, reading habits and method. In a recent article updating her findings, she reported that nearly half of all groups in the UK are now mixed, not women-only, and their choices are highly unpredictable – some three-quarters of all books chosen by groups in her survey were read by only one group.
On the plus side, fans cite reading groups as proof of a flourishing literary culture, like the festivals name-checked by Gordon Brown. But they might also be a sign of failure: a cultish effort to seek out small numbers of like-minded people, in an otherwise uninterested environment. It is certainly a sign of fragmentation: with so many different titles out there, how else can one find a group of people who have all read the same thing?
Of course I am biased. I started a reading group 10 years ago, before they became fashionable. The group, drawn from readers of Prospect, is still going strong. Why did I start it? Because I read a lot, and enjoy discussing what I am reading with other people. The views of others bring fresh insights, and the effort of communicating makes me distill my own thinking. Why has it continued? Because other people feel the same way. Why do I bother to counter these attacks? Because the activity they are describing is unrecognisable.
In a reading group, we remain individual readers. We read on our own, and bring our thoughts to the discussion. It seems odd to assume that discussion equals conformity. There is some collectivity, which is not the same thing: we have certainly developed a collective memory, saved for posterity in monthly email reports. I hope eventually to put all 10 years of our reports in the public domain, to see if others find them interesting. An outside observer may even be able to find an implicit ‘system’ in our response, though I would say our group has resisted any totalising theories.
If there is anything that unifies our response, it is not critical theory but a form of poetics. Our group includes several writers and editors who are interested in how literature is made, from the maker’s point of view. One suspects that a more general audience is interested in this too, hence the success of commentaries like John Mullan’s Guardian book club series. But this only works when the audience is taken seriously. John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel, for example, makes a cynical (mis)calculation that it can get away with sheer waffle, because it is not for a ‘professional’ audience. Zadie Smith herself, who is including her essays on writing in a forthcoming collection, will find an enthusiastic market among reading group members – or may do so, if she can cut out the insults.
What does ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ mean in this context? As a professional wordsmith I believe there is a distinction, but also notice an interesting trend. In the Web 2.0 world of user-generated content, the task of selecting and evaluating content simply moves downwards, from supposedly elitist gatekeepers to the ordinary punter. In response, the ordinary punter has started to train for the task, and become a little more professional. Hence the interest in university writing courses and degrees in vocational media subjects. Hence also the move in our reading group from vague talk of what people ‘like’ (or not), to more disciplined discussions about the choices writers make. In other words, we are looking ‘at’ the work, not just ‘through’ it, as Richard Lanham puts it in The Attention Economy.
Prospect has not yet made too much of its ‘offline community’ of readers: this blog is a start. From the end of August, I shall be posting regular notes about our discussions. At the next meeting, we will be looking at Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, reportedly based on Bloom. I hope to see you here again.
• Read about the Bloom discussion here
• Read the October discussion here, on Measuring the World
Harry Potter and the Power of Narrative. Many, many articles on JK Rowling’s books have been published over the last few weeks. I liked literary critic Michael Bérubé’s essay about what the books mean to his son Jamie. (Scroll down to get a PDF.)
Potter in the past. Prospect briefly dipped a toe in these waters in October 2000, when Richard Jenkyns appraised the first four books and found their roots in the peculiarly English genre of school stories.
Burn Voldemort’s Butt. This was definitely the oddest Harry Potter article I’ve read.
(And if you’re looking forward to reading book seven, I hope no one spoils it for you, like people did last time.)
Some readers may recognize the above as the start of a widely-used editorial “filler” or “placeholder” text—a block of words put temporarily into the space where real editorial copy will eventually go, to help editors estimate what the final version will look like and what the word-count will be. We use “lorem ipsum” at Prospect, along with the slightly less romantic “something in here something in here something in here something in here” for our standfirsts (the introductory or summary information above an article.)
“Lorem ipsum” looks like Latin but isn’t, quite, although it is based on a Latin text. Specifically—as we know today thanks to the efforts of one Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia—it derives from a passage in Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum [On the Extremes of Goods and Evils], which begins:
Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, ed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.
It means, approximately:
There is no-one who wishes to obtain and seeks out pain simply because it is pain; but there are occasionally circumstances in which toil and pain can bring a person great pleasure.
All modern editors will, I’m sure, have a rich empathy with these sentiments, but their use as a placeholder dates right back to the 1500s, not long after the invention of printing itself. It’s a rather lovely thought—that something continues to be used in an industry almost half a millennium after its first appearance, without there being any pressing reason for this continuity—and yet “lorem ipsum” is only the tip of the editorial iceberg.
Take the example of Hypertext Markup Language, better known as html: the behind-the-scenes code used to generate the appearance of web pages. It’s very much a twenty-first-century affair, yet a closer look soon reveals some ancient terminologies and ideas still in use. To create this effect, for example, I use the “emphasis” tag, <em>; while to create this effect I use the “strong emphasis” tag, <strong>. They’re a more useful pair of terms than “italics” and “bold” because they’re more sensitive to semantics, but they also stretch back to the dawn of printing and, before this, to those Greek and Roman rhetorical devices of which Cicero was such a master (emphasis, Latin, from Greek, denoting “special and significant stress by means of position or repetition.”)
In many ways, the project of making words lucidly convey sense and feeling has been less transformed by technology than you might think.
Recent Comments