Author: Mark Hannam

As the earth’s atmosphere continues to warm up, so political leaders from around the world head to Glasgow for the 26^th Conference of Parties.  There will be no shortage of hot air, but unfortunately there is unlikely to be an immediate step-change in public policy, which is what we need.

By coincidence the UK’s annual budget for the next financial year was announced last week, which included a measure to lower the rate of tax on domestic air travel and another to defer a planned rise in the rate of tax on petrol.  These measures were both aimed at pleasing the travelling public, lowering the cost of short-haul flights between, say, London and Cardiff or Edinburgh and Belfast, and avoiding additional costs for drivers at a time when oil prices have risen steeply.  Given the choice between long-term virtue and short-term popularity, it is perhaps no surprise that the politicians choose the latter.  But it is important to recognise that they do so because they understand that many of us share their preference for instant gratification.  We might not have the politicians we say we want, but we mostly get the politicians we deserve.

Continue reading “Hot air”

I start with a joke.  There are 10 sorts of people in the world.  Those who understand binary numbers and those who don’t.   

In our culture, we are encouraged to think that we can divide the world up using binary oppositions.  We are either x or we are y.  In politics we are on the left or on the right; in personality we are extrovert or introvert; for our intellectual training we choose between the sciences or the arts; we are routinely asked, by organisations gathering data on diversity, whether we are male or female, homo- or hetero-, abled or disabled, black or white; in London, you either live north of the river or you don’t really live in London at all, which illustrates a significant problem about the use of dichotomies: they set people in opposition one with another.    

I recently came across a remark by Bertrand Russell, who said of the development of his philosophical temperament that he had leapt from the Hegelian view that the world was a bowl of treacle to the atomist view that the world was a bowl of lead shot.  In other words, he had abandoned the view that we cannot understand anything until we understand everything, since as Hegel claimed the true is the whole, and instead had adopted the view that the only way to understand anything is to break it down into its component parts and try to understand each of them in turn and then figure out how they connect.  Atomists, of whom Russell is a good example, think that the main purpose of philosophy is analysis, that is, the systematic separation of each part or element of a phenomenon, so that it can be studied in isolation; by contract, treaclists, of whom John Dewey might be a good example, think that the main purpose of philosophy is synthesis, that is, the examination of the interconnectedness of phenomena, so that their reciprocal influence upon each other can be understood.  I was taught philosophy in the atomist tradition, but during my training I leapt in the opposite direction to Bertrand Russell, and I am now a confirmed treaclist.  I try to resist attempts to divide up the world, believing that we understand best when we consider the whole and the fulness of its variety.   There are many more than 10 sorts of people in my world.

Continue reading “Atomic treacle”

This week, there are lengthy queues outside petrol stations in Britain, as desperate motorists try to secure fuel for their cars.  The companies that supply petrol stations say there is a shortage of lorry drivers to transport fuel from the refineries and that the government needs to offer visas to foreign drivers to meet demand.  The government, not wanting to accept that its policy on immigration – linked inevitably to the way it managed the UK’s exit from the EU – is the source of the problem, says that there is no shortage of fuel in the country.   Unsurprisingly, as soon as government ministers deny that there is a shortage, some drivers assume they are lying and head to the petrol stations to fill up.  Many others, seeing growing lines of cars, waiting at the pumps, worry that they will lose out unless they join; so, they do.  Whether or not there was a serious problem a few days ago, there is certainly one now.

Queues of irate drivers waiting impatiently to buy petrol makes for good television and newspaper coverage, which has temporarily displaced the story of the other, more serious energy crisis from the headlines.  Natural gas is a major source of energy for the UK, with more than four out of five households reliant on gas for heating their homes and around a third of wholesale electricity produced by burning gas.  Prices have risen dramatically over the past twelve months, for example, the ICE’s NBP Natural Gas Index has risen from 33.5 to 213.  Whether this price spike will be temporary is unclear, but it has become a political problem for the UK because of the way in which energy prices are regulated.

Continue reading “The cap that does not fit”

I am writing this text at my house in Co Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland.  This is my first visit for twelve months, my first journey into the European Union since the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland formally exited.  Flying from London to Belfast was my first trip by plane for a year and, for some reason I am not fully certain of, it was comforting to travel at altitude once more.  I am glad to be back.

The house was in good condition, despite the absence of occupants for a year.  My neighbour checks in regularly and my local contractor fixed a problem with the heating system over the winter.  There are no signs of damp or water damage, no broken tiles or windowpanes, and the plumbing and electrics all seem to be working well.  I have replaced the batteries in the smoke alarms and defrosted the freezer, and in addition I have given all the rooms a thorough clean since I discovered a greater than usual number of spider’s webs and a plenitude of dead flies. Most of the latter were scattered across the floors: I imagine the flies entered the house via the vents in the windows but could not find their way back out again and died of cold, hunger, or old age.  A few were tangled up in webs, but I suspect most of the flies that were trapped that way had already been eaten.  The war between the Arachnids and the Muscidæ lacks the graphic intensity of Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw” and does not stir the passions as that between the Jets and the Sharks, but it is nonetheless one small part of the cosmic evolutionary struggle.  The detritus of battle was soon sucked up by my vacuum cleaner, and the house feels more comfortable for humans as a result.

Continue reading “I re-land”

We call them the Dark Ages, but all that we mean is that we cannot see. R G Collingwood

I have written previously about Dante, who died seven hundred years ago.  He is considered by some critics to be the greatest poet of the Western canon, whose artistic innovation in the Commedia transformed our understanding of what it means to be human.  One of the conceits of the poem is that Dante, the narrator of the story, is guided through hell and purgatory by Virgil, the Roman poet whom he greatly admired.  Previously, I had taken this to be solely a literary device, that allows for a continuous dialogue between the two protagonists as they travel, by which the fates of the various characters they encounter can be explained to the reader and, at the same time, an implicit assertion by Dante that he too ranked as one of the great poets.  Recently, my attention was drawn to a point that previously I had missed entirely: Virgil lived in the age of the Emperor Augustus, born in 70BCE and died in 19BCE, whereas Dante was born in 1265CE and died in 1321CE.  The distance in time between Dante’s death and Virgil’s death – 1340 years – is almost twice as long as the distance between the date of Dante’s death and the present time.  Dante is far more contemporary with us than Virgil was with him. 

Now consider a modern-day poet.  Bob Dylan this year celebrated his eightieth birthday.  Growing up, he would have enjoyed the US’s post-war economic boom, in his twenties he was part of the Civil Rights Movement, in the seventies he lived through the Vietnam War, the oil crisis, and the first landing on the moon.  In more recent years he will have encountered novelties such as the internet, electric cars, and 3D-printing.  Now imagine a woman who celebrated her eightieth birthday in the year of his birth.  She would have been born in 1861, the year that the Civil War broke out in the US, and during her lifetime she would have experienced the development of electric lights, motor cars, the first human flight in an aeroplane, and the first global war.  She would also have been entertained by innovations such as photography, the movies, and jazz music.  The world of her birth – when none of the above were part of daily life – seems unimaginably remote to me.  While Bob Dylan seems to be my contemporary, an imaginary woman who lived from 1861 to 1941 appears to come from way back in the historical past.

Continue reading “Lost time”