Writing on the Wall

The leaders of big oil companies should get behind the scheme of contraction and convergence, as it might be their only chance of avoiding nationalisation.
It should have been a wake up cry for big oil when UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon announced (1) that the tragedy of Darfur was caused by global warming. You would think that the horror of a country collapsing into civil war under environmental pressures would be enough. But I suspect that the really frightening thing for oil bosses is the techtonic shift in opinion that means a Secretary General will say this despite American disapproval. The world is changing,and so are the political dynamics that go with it. Indeed, on closer examination, the situation in Darfur reveals how profound these changes are.
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For a society that is so oriented to growth and progress, we seem remarkably immune to good news. We have a deep philosophical cynicism about such simple things as love and sympathy, even though there is evidence that these are forces with significant impact in our world. We are suspicious of ideas like happiness, even if they are central to our highest ethics, both freedom and progress. How can you be free if you are so unhappy you cannot enjoy your good fortune? How can there be progress where this becomes a general condition? Progress or Prozac?

Take the decline of violence in the world: There are fewer and smaller wars now than ever before. The depressing spectacle of embedded journalism, during the last attempt to make war work, had lying beneath it a very good piece of news. People so dislike seeing others blown to pieces, that wars must now be structured around the public not seeing this happen. The media has extended people’s senses, and with it their consciences, and this has shaped the geopolitical ‘realism’ of the most powerful players in the world.

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The two people who mind the garden in our house, between them they earn 2000 rupees a month. That’s about £25-30. Funny thing is that the housekeeper, who makes 1000 rupees a month (for half-time work, that’s a relatively good deal for the market she is operating in) questioned why they struggled to get by on that money.

The answer came back that so many people come and eat at their house. In other words, on that kind of money, they are acting as a form of local social welfare, and it would be seen as strange if they didn’t do so. Upshot of it is that the wife of our care-taking couple has arthritis and needs 30 rupees (50 pence) to get on a bus to the local state hospital. I suspect that this is true, but actually don’t care if it is not. It is almost harder to deal with their honesty than with being ripped off.

Funnily enough I just read a piece by John Gray in the New Statesman about human agency, and the wierd take poltical philosophers tend to take on it. It was incidentally about Nazi Germany.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120045

Gray, as ever, was taking a pop at our weird image of enlightenment man being able to transform the world at will. OK John got the message. He also had a plug to his latest book , something characteristically morose and pessimistic. His point being that people often don’t have control over their lives.

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The tension between those that see things in terms of dominant groups persuading the rest to do their bidding, and practical folk who are concerned with how things get done, has some very interesting philosophical underpinnings.

Action requires a basis. This is simple in principle: In order to exercise agency and bring about some outcomes in preference to other outcomes, you need to be able to exercise some control. That control is in turn only possible if you can render things in some way predictable.

Fixed forms therefore either need to be picked out as stable entities from the surroundings, or need to be rendered as fixed entities by some sort of effort. This applies as much to representations as it does to materialities. These two can be seen as aspects of social practices also.

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Intelligent design - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Intelligent Design debate is dogged by some serious problems. One of the main problems is that each side is arguing from differing terms of reference: Scientists form a belief in the primacy in the Scientific method, and the Religious from the primacy in belief. I personally think that the former is better for producing knowledge, and the better more effective in producing happiness, although I remain agnostic in my personal beliefs.

But I do think Intelligent Design is fundamentally flawed, but it is so within its own terms of reference. If we go with the idea, for the sake of discussion, that there is a God, who is interested in creating a Universe. [S]He is, by most religious accounts, an infinite being, with no constraints of time and space to worry about.

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I went to see Tom Stoppard’s play ‘Rock and Roll’ last night. It was interesting precisely because it was so predictable. I was suprised by how well it fitted with ideas I had been rolling around in my head for a while.

What was predictable in Tom Stoppard’s script was the celebration of ‘not caring’ and ‘doing your own thing.’ In many ways it was an honest social document of idealism caving in to the relativistic individualism of the 80’s, with the fall of communism and the rise of ‘liberated’ consumption.

However the calculated irresponsibility of Stoppard’s play is not just a piece of social history, but also something very contemporary. It is part of a huge denial of reponsibility by the rich and powerful, a denial that has eaten its way in to almost every area of contemporary thought.

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