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Many years ago, I read an article describing a medical research study, the results of which suggested a connection between regular consumption of coffee and the development of lung cancer.  I was immediately concerned by this report, because I used to drink several cups of strong coffee each day.  I was also immediately puzzled, because I could not see any plausible causal connection between the consumption of coffee and the health of the lungs.  I could more easily have understood that coffee might have harmful effects on the mouth or the throat or the stomach, but I had always considered it a wonderful feature of the human anatomy that while both air and liquids come into the body through the same entrance, somehow we were able to direct the former to the lungs to be processed in the aerobic system and the later to the stomach to be processed in the digestive system.  I have no expertise in medicine or anatomy, but the article’s result seemed suspect to me.

I was right.  A short time later, I read an article that rebutted the conclusions of the first research paper, pointing out that the reason why there was a connection between coffee drinking and lung cancer was simply because many people who smoked numerous cigarettes also liked to drink plenty of coffee.   Nicotine not caffeine was the cause of the lung cancer, but smoking was highly correlated to coffee drinking, and thus coffee drinking is indirectly related to the prevalence of lung cancer, but in a non-causal way.  It is not hard to imagine other examples of this sort of relationship.  Eating fish – high in protein but low in fat – is generally regarded as a healthier choice to eating meat, especially processed meat.  However, if my habitual piscine meal is English style “fish ‘n’ chips”, which I eat most days of the week, then any health benefits from the fish are likely to be overwhelmed by the excess calories and saturated fats that I absorb via my consumption of chips. 

Continue reading “Uncorrelated”

Not long after I had left college and moved to London, I went to visit a friend who lived in a big house Muswell Hill, divided up, as many were in those days, into several small flats.  We were drinking and talking when one of the neighbours knocked on the door and came in to join our company. In conversation, we discovered that he played in a band, and not just any band but The Blockheads, who were famous for supporting Ian Dury, one of London’s best new-wave singers of the late 70s and early 80s.  The musical neighbour told us some good stories about life on the road, and of good and bad gigs, but there was plenty of drinking and smoking that evening and I no longer remember in any detail what he said.

I do still remember some of Ian Dury’s songs, and in particular Reasons to be Cheerful, Part III, which comprises a list of some of the many things that he took pleasure in.  It is, I suppose, a post-punk version of My Favourite Things, from the film The Sound of Music, although Ian Dury ranks higher on my list of favourite things than Julie Andrews.  There is much on Dury’s list that I am indifferent about, but there is also plenty which, for me as for him, supplies good reason to be cheerful: the Bolshoi Ballet, equal votes, porridge oats, a little drop of claret, curing smallpox, Bantu Steve Biko, Harpo Groucho Chico, and – perhaps best of all – John Coltrane’s soprano: all good things, for me. 

There are other modern songwriters who have used the list as a device to structure a song.  Dylan’s Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 , which is the opening track on the album Blonde on Blonde (1966) is one example, although to my mind it is the weakest song on what is otherwise an album replete with masterpieces.  Later, on Slow Train Coming (1979), the first and best of his “Gospel” albums, Dylan repeated the trick, opening with Gotta Serve Somebody, which I consider an exemplar of how to make use of the repetitive process inherent in reading through a long list to increase the dramatic effect and power of the song.  I love this outtake version, with Mark Knopfler on lead guitar.

Using lists to make a moral point is nothing new.  In the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna there is a wonderful painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder called Children’s Games (1560).  This genre of artwork is known as Wimmelbilder, (“busy pictures”), characterised by the viewer’s elevated perspective over the wide pictorial space, in which are spread a large number of figures with no obvious clue or sign within the painting as to their relative importance.  Children’s Games isa list with encyclopaedic ambition.  The painting contains 230 figures, most or all of whom are children, itself an innovation without precedent in Western art, who are engaged in playing around 90 games, some of which would be familiar to children today, and others which seem obscure. 

What was Bruegel trying to show his viewers, aside from his mastery of composition and figure?  Some art historians think the painting is a celebration of folklore and the life of the common people; others think it is akin to a morality tale, perhaps an illustration of the humanist idea of the world as a stage on which we all features as performers; yet others interpret it as a critique of the adult world, in which we remain childlike despite our self-image of maturity.  Whatever Bruegel’s intention, what impresses me about this work, in addition to its clear technical merits, is the aspiration of the artist to catalogue exhaustively an important feature of human life.  This is not a picture showing a handful of children playing a game, it is a picture showing a city full of children playing every known game at that time. 

One hundred years after Bruegel made this picture, a fellow Netherlander, Jacobus Hondius, published a book in Amsterdam entitled Swart register van duysent sonden (‘The Black Register of One Thousand Sins’).  My limited research into this obscure volume from 1679, reveals that Hondius used his book to denounce the directors of both the Dutch West India Company and Dutch East India Company for their participation in the slave trade, for which we should commend him.  Given his role as a Predikant (minister) in the Dutch Calvinist church, I rather doubt that I would agree with his views on many of the other 999 sins in his book, but once again, what fascinates here is the vast amount of labour he devoted to listing one thousand ways in which we might fail: an encyclopaedia of fallenness.

One of the shared features of the song lyrics of Dury and Dylan and the painting by Bruegel, is that they list without ranking.  Their aim is to catalogue, to document, to explore the breadth or the range, but not to impose an order.  Yet, it is one of the features of lists that they make rankings possible.  Just as the list of cardinal numbers (one, two, three, and so on) makes possible the list of ordinal numbers (first, second, third, and so on), so the list of things which makes me cheerful invites the question, which of these makes me most cheerful, and the list of children’s games invites the thought, which is the most enjoyable game.  The organization of the world into lists facilitates the ordering of the world into values.

In the years after Hondius had published his Register, the fashion for compiling long lists of objects and classifying them into groups, and in some cases ranking those groups into some form of order, became a central feature of  Enlightenment science in Europe.  Perhaps most famous of all the classifiers was Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who spend his early years travelling around Sweden, the country of his birth, collecting information on its natural resources and documenting the flora and fauna.  In later life, as a Professor at Uppsala University he sent his students on collecting missions all around the world, to bring him examples of plants and animals unknown in Europe.  In total, he named over 12,000 species, and they were all fitted into his system of ordering the natural world, his great taxonomical project through which all objects, living or not, were assigned their proper place. 

A century later, Charles Darwin wrote a book called The Origin of Species (1859) which does not say much about origins, and the main conclusion of which is that there are no stable species, simply groups of living organisms transforming gradually from one sort of thing to another sort of thing, better to fit within their local habitat.  If we accept the truth of evolutionary theory, then taxonomies of plants and animals are mere snapshots, provisional lists awaiting revision.  Had Ian Dury lived to be an old man perhaps he would have written a song called Reasons to be Cheerful Part IV, including some nice rhymes for ‘slippers’ and ‘afternoon naps’, demonstrating that our taste in pleasure likewise evolves over time.  Imagine Bruegel painting a picture today: 230 children playing different games, but all on their mobile phones.

We might think that the inanimate world would be more stable, resistant to changes in taste or modifications of genetic expression.  Except that, while the objects in the universe might be stable in character, our systems of classification are not.  When I was a child, long before my night out in Muswell Hill, I learned the names of the nine planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.  Alas, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided to redesignate Pluto as a “dwarf planet” (along with Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris).  According to the IAU, a planet must (a) orbit its host star, (b) be mostly round, and (c) be sufficiently big that its gravitational field has cleared away other objects of similar size near to its orbital route.  Pluto fails on point (c).  It is thought that there may be many dwarf planets – perhaps one hundred – in our solar system, most yet to be discovered.  In 2016, some astronomers posited the existence of a new ninth planet, around ten times the mass of Earth, based on inferences drawn from the behaviour of objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy rocks that orbit the Sun way beyond Neptune.  How many planets are there in our solar system: maybe nine, maybe eight, maybe nine.   How many dwarf planets are there: maybe five, maybe one hundred and five.

Closer to earth, the formal classification and naming of clouds started in earnest in the early nineteenth century when Luke Howard (1772-1864), then resident in Tottenham, read a paper at the Askesian Society in December 1802, which was published the following year as On the Modification of Clouds.  Howard divided clouds into three main groups – Stratus, Cumulus, and Cirrus – based on their height above the ground.  This schema has been extended over time and today the World Meteorological Organization recognizes ten basic groups, which are the low-level clouds, below 2,000m (Stratus, Nimbostratus, Cumulonimbus, Cumulus, and Stratocumulus), the mid-level clouds, between 2,000m and 6,000m (Altostratus and Altocumulus), and the high level clouds, above 6,000m (Cirrostratus, Cirrocumulus, and Cirrus).  Giving clouds names from Latin adjectives has become something of a tradition, just as the planets were named after Roman gods.  In the International Cloud Atlas there are also listed some special clouds, such as the Cirrus Homogenitus, meaning a human generated cloud, such as the condensation trails created by aircraft.

Clouds created by humans brings to mind other ways in which our taxonomies of natural phenomena are likely to change in coming years.  Just as animals and plants evolve in response to changes in their environment, so too humans make significant changes to the environment which they inhabit, rendering any system of classification inherently unstable.  Modifications to the weather caused by global warming is one example, damage to the seabed caused by pollution is another.  In addition to the ice rocks of the Kuiper Belt, our solar system has another belt of objects, this one much closer to home, circling the Earth, comprised of satellite and rocket debris.  The European Space Agency reports that there are over 28,000 pieces of debris in orbit, with a total estimated mass of more than 9,300 tonnes.  As a consequence, expectations are rising of the risk of collisions, causing significant damage to satellites.

Space debris is a product of earthly hubris.  We like to assert our power over the natural world, but often fail to consider the consequences.  Classification is the prelude to control, but control might turn out to be illusory.  In Lotte in Weimar (1939), a novel set in 1816, Thomas Mann imagines Goethe describing the weather, making oblique reference to Luke Howard: Used to be no proper interest in these variables in the upper regions; now a man has written a whole book about them, with an entire new terminology … So now we can nail down these changeable humours and tell them to their faces what species and class they belong to.  That is man’s prerogative on earth: to call things by their name and put them in a system.  They cast down their eyes before him, so to speak, when he calls them by name, for to name is to command.

Were I to write my own version of Ian Dury’s famous song, both Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann would surely feature. 

The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas. 

So wrote Mark Rothko, in a manuscript that he worked on in the early 1940s, while he took a break from painting.  At that time his pictures were figurative, later he experimented for a few years with a form of surrealism, before developing the large abstract colour paintings for which he became famous.  He is an artist whose work we tend to discover in reverse chronological order: the late works are the most familiar, and the transitional experiments in surrealism and abstraction are somewhat better known that his figurative work. Despite these radical changes in form and scale, his work pursues a consistent theme, namely his determination to draw our attention to the sorrow and suffering that is central to our experience of life.  Rothko’s abandonment of figuration midway through his career, was not an abandonment of interest in the human, rather it was his attempt to depict the full range of human experience, and especially our experiences of unhappiness, more convincingly.

Rothko’s manuscript, The Artist’s Reality, was published in 2004, more than thirty years after his death by suicide.  Like Paul Gaugin’s Recontars de Rapin, written in 1903 but not published until 1951, Rothko’s attack on contemporary art criticism is heartfelt and persuasive, but his ability to explain in words the meaning and importance of his art is less convincing.  Gauguin and Rothko were both great painters, but neither were great writers.  Nonetheless, their texts do tell us something about the questions that concerned them, the problems that they tried to address, the ideas that motivated them.  Knowing this helps us better to understand their most compelling paintings. 

Continue reading “Simply colour”

This is the year of elections: voters in Bangladesh, Russia, and India have already cast their ballots; voters in South Africa and Mexico do so at the time of writing; and voters in many other countries, including Uruguay and Namibia, and the UK and the US, will have the opportunity later in the year.  Not all of these elections will be free and fair, and not all will lead to good outcomes for the citizens: elections are imperfect procedures and voters sometimes have little real choice.  At other times, the voters come to regret the choices they made.   Nonetheless this year, more people have the chance to vote than in any previous year in human history, and that is something for us to celebrate.  (Not so, of course, if you are the loyal scion of an hereditary ruling dynasty, but for the rest of us, modest celebration seems to be in order.)

Dissatisfaction with political outcomes is not new.  In the Western tradition, the earliest historians and political philosophers spent considerable time reflecting on why their city states were not better governed, and whether the rulers or the ruled were mostly to blame.  When Solon, the famous lawmaker, was asked whether he had given the Athenians the best laws, he replied, the best they would accept.  Balancing the optimal with the consensual lies at the heart of politics, and in the long-run, we should expect democracies to achieve this balance more regularly and more sustainably than other forms of government, owing to their improved capacity to learn and innovate.  But this does not guarantee that they will be more successful always and everywhere.  Democracies are also to be preferred because they tend to exhibit higher respect for law and less deference to rulers.  

Continue reading “The rule of law”

Earlier this year, the TLS published my review of two books by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas.  In the recently translated first volume of Also a History of Philosophy (2023), Habermas discusses a paradox in the genealogy of post-metaphysical thinking, that is, contemporary philosophical thought that is concerned with the character of our knowledge of the world, but which has abandoned any ambition to imagine, describe, or know anything beyond our world.  The paradox is this: despite the secular character of modern Western thought, its origins can be traced back to early Jewish theology and ancient Greek metaphysics.  In this respect, modern Western thought shares features common to other major intellectual traditions which also draw upon ancient religious texts, notably, Buddhism and the Vedic teachings of ancient India, and Taoism and the Confucian teachings of ancient China.  These traditions all experienced a gradual but decisive revolution in character during in the period known as the Axial Age (roughly, the eighth to the third centuries, BCE). 

Habermas’s argument is that during the Axial Age, previously well-established forms of reasoning ceased to provide convincing explanations for what was observed in the natural world, and that core religious beliefs and ritual behaviours ceased to provide effective forms of communal integration in the shared social world.  These failures, or blockages, provoked the intellectual revolutions associated with the teachings of Buddha, Moses, Laozi, and Plato.  The collective learning processes that overcame these blockages – which took different forms in each context – provide the template for Habermas’s theory of philosophical and social progress.  As a species, he argues, we are able to learn, to solve problems, to improve our knowledge of the world around us and the arrangements by which we organise our society.  While progress has taken different forms in the East and the West, there is an underlying continuity of shared learning and its application across the whole range of human thought. 

Continue reading “Unlimited endings”