Author: Mark Hannam

Would you swallow the blue pill or the red pill? 

The blue pill returns you to the invisible prison that is your artificially simulated reality, whereas the red pill allows you to discover the truth of your enslavement by the machines.  Have you ever wondered why you only have two pills to choose between?   If you buy a pack of chocolate M&Ms you also get brown, green, yellow, and orange options. 

In a famous poem, Robert Frost described his moment of choice between two paths in a wood, knowing that he might never pass that way again he surmised that the choice he was about to make would later seem to him to have made all the difference.  Did he never consider the possibility that he could reject both paths, and make his own, new track through the woods?   In the mid-nineteenth century, the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote a famous book, Either/Or, in which he compared two approaches to the conduct of life, one primarily aesthetic the other ethical.  Is there not a third way?  And not just a third but, perhaps, a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh way to live.  What is the attraction of binary choices?  In part, for the decision maker, choices become quicker and easier for there are only two option to consider.  Our bodies and our language normalise this way of thinking: on the one hand, on the other hand.  In part, however, the binary structure allows the person who is presenting our choices to us, to seek to persuade us to do something we might otherwise be reluctant to do, by making the alternative highly unattractive.  There is significant rhetorical force in the design of a false dichotomy. 

Continue reading “False dichotomies”

When I was ten years old, I asked my parents to buy me a guitar so that I could learn how to play.  I had been given a vinyl recording of classical works transcribed for the guitar, performed by Andrés Segovia, and I decided that I would learn to play like him.  I duly received a small guitar, with nylon strings suitable for a beginner, and I started going to weekly lessons to learn the basics of how to position the fingers of my left hand against the frets and how to use the fingers of my right hand to pluck the strings.  In due course, I bought some music scores for guitar – works by Bach, Sor, Villa-Lobos, and Schubert simplified for those just starting to learn to play – and I was delighted when, after much practice and having overcome many mistakes, I was able to play a few bars. 

I never achieved my goal of becoming as good as Segovia.  There were, I now understand, three reasons for this failure.  First, I did not practice often enough or long enough.  After an initial burst of enthusiasm, my desire to learn how to play scales, read music, and improve my finger technique quickly diminished, and anyway was never able to compete with my duty to complete my homework and my desire to play sport.   Second, my taste in music changed.  For a while, I imagined that I could become as good a guitarist as Carlos Santana; then I lowered my expectations and decided that it would be sufficient to become merely a competent player, so long as I could write songs that were as good as Bob Dylan’s.  I bought an acoustic guitar, with steel strings and a plectrum, and switched my attention from Baroque to Blues, but the results were not much better.  The third and most important reason for my failure to become a great guitarist was my inability to distinguish sounds accurately.  I have met people who can listen to a melody once and then play it, whereas I struggled to tune the strings of my guitar.  Generally, I have no idea what key a song is in, nor can I judge the intervals between notes, nor do I really understand how the chord sequences work.  Whether this is at root a physical problem – that the sensitivity of my ears is just not good enough – or, rather, the consequence of a lack of training of my sense of sound, I do not know.  At some point, however, it became clear to me that I was never going to become a competent musician, let alone a great one.

Continue reading “Changing the tempo”

I used to think that War and Peace was the best novel ever written, but then I read Anna Karenina and was no longer so sure. 

Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina in the 1870s and he conceived the book as a literary riposte to John Stuart Mill’s advocacy of women’s equality.  Tolstoy was a great believer in marriage and large families – his wife gave birth to thirteen children – and notwithstanding his numerous casual sexual liaisons prior to his own wedding, including fathering a child with one of his serfs, his views on women’s role in society were deeply conservative.  His greatness as a novelist is in large part due to his ability to write sympathetically about characters whose behaviour he fundamentally disapproved of.  Most modern readers will find Anna’s choices defensible, her treatment by her husband deplorable, her social ostracism hypocritical, and her suicide tragic.  It is possible to admire the story without thereby partaking in Tolstoy’s moral disapprobation because his portrayal of Anna’s actions and their consequences present us with a credible and moving account of one of the great universal themes in human experience.  Whatever his personal views, Tolstoy describes his own society with precision and sensitivity, but without direct judgement.

On reflection, however, I still consider War and Peace the better book not least because in this earlier story Tolstoy’s array of characters were situated within a moment of dramatic social and political upheaval, as the Napoleonic armies swept east from Paris to Moscow.  In this case, we are treated not just to a series of descriptions of personal love and loss, of ambition and disappointment, of friendship and enmity, and of military heroism and incompetence, but also to a panoramic view of the Russian nation in turmoil.  This lengthy book is then brought to a bizarre conclusion by a diatribe by the author on the meaning of history, the chaos of war, and the fundamental error of according a role to “great men” in the achievement of social change.  War and Peace is a great novel – perhaps the greatest novel – precisely because Tolstoy does not just tell an interesting story with strong characters, good plot development, and a well-balanced narrative structure, but he also tells us many interesting and important things about life, by sprinkling liberally into the text many of his own eccentric opinions.  (This is also the reason why Cervantes, Melville, Joyce, Proust, and Musil are great novelists too).

Continue reading “Russia at war”

Thirty years ago, I helped to run local election campaigns for the Labour Party in Hackney, the London borough where I still live.  There were no large sums of money involved and the technology deployed was very basic, principally pencils and sheets of paper on which were printed names and addresses.  Mostly the campaign was legwork, going door-to-door in the early evenings and at the weekends, speaking to potential voters, identifying those whom you judged most likely to support your party, and then persuading these good citizens to come out on polling day and mark their ballot papers for your candidates.   Turnout in London local elections is generally below half of the eligible electorate.  Boroughs are divided up into around twenty wards, and in mine, which had three Councillors, to get elected you needed around 1,000 to 1,200 votes.  Local politics can be just as hotly contested as national politics, and during election campaigns many of the candidates and activists would work long hours, fuelled by coffee and adrenaline, having convinced themselves that if our candidates were to win, a giant step would be taken towards achieving a happy socialist future; conversely, if the opposing party were to win, it would constitute a major triumph for the malevolent forces of reaction.  My role, as I understood it, was to remain calm and focus attention on the mundane task of ensuring that just over one thousand residents, who had been identified as sympathetic to Labour, knew the date the election was taking place, the location of the polling station, and the names of our candidates.

In 1993, one of our three Labour Ward Councillors was arrested and charged with fraud.  His crime was relatively trivial, claiming a couple of hundred pounds of expenses for travel to meetings that he had not attended, but British judges take the view that elected officials who defraud the public of its own money should be made an example and deserve full punishment for the crime.  He pleaded guilty at his trial and was sentenced to six months in prison.  He was forced to resign his seat.  I was then tasked with managing a tricky by-election campaign to try to retain the seat at a time when the local party’s reputation had been badly damaged.  Nonetheless, turnout at by-elections is often even lower than at the routine scheduled elections, and I was able to secure 757 votes for Labour’s new candidate, which was sufficient to win the seat once again, thereby launching the political career of the MP who is now the Chair of the Parliamentary Standards Committee.  After one more election cycle, my paid work commitments made it difficult for me to continue in my voluntary campaign manager role, and I passed on my responsibilities to others. 

Continue reading “On the level”

One of life’s great uncertainties is whether we will be remembered after our death, and if so by whom and in what way.  For most of us, the best we can hope is that friends and family will think kindly about us once we are gone.  To have made a positive impression upon and be well regarded by those who knew us best is no small thing.  For a few, records of whose words and deeds will be passed down to posterity, the expectation of lasting fame comes mixed with concern.  Will future generations remember them for the great things they achieved, or for some modest act with which they become associated?  Will future generations judge them more or less harshly than their contemporaries did?    Alfred (d. 899) the Saxon king of England, is now mostly remembered for allowing some cakes to burn, rather than his military victories, his legal and educational reforms, and his scholarship.  Richard (d. 1199), the Norman king of England, is celebrated today for his military prowess and piety, whereas the anti-Jewish riots which accompanied his coronation are largely forgotten.  Posthumous reputations are beyond the control of those to whom they attach.

Today, David Hume (d. 1776) is considered one of the pre-eminent British philosophers, whose work has greatly influenced not only the course of modern philosophy but also other important areas of social scientific study, notably psychology and economics.  During his lifetime, however, he was known primarily as an historian and essayist.  His History of England, published in six volumes, was widely discussed during his lifetime but not much today.  In a book published in 2008, the Hume scholar Annette Baier (d. 2012) wrote, I have been reading Hume now for sixty years, though it took retirement for me to really read his History of England.  Hume’s essays were also popular in his own day, ranging widely in length and subject matter, but mostly concerned with moral, political, and literary matters.  Last year, two hundred and eighty years after the first edition of the Essays was published, Oxford University Press issued the first, full critical edition – 1,200 pages in all – including a comprehensive account of the various published versions, with all revisions and deletions included.  Despite this new scholarly edition, they remain less familiar to most contemporary philosophers than Hume’s more overtly philosophical writings, which provoked widespread uninterest during his lifetime.

Continue reading “Death and taxes”