Pony-Powered Enlightenment Bullshit

This sounds like bullshit, of course, and I confess I’m spinning this out more than is warranted, but there is an immense calm, neatness and harmony about developing with Django. Everything’s at just the right level; everything fits together in just the right way. Everything’s in the right place, everything’s in nice little pieces that fit together like a jigsaw.

You know when you read a textbook and you get the feeling that the author knows exactly what you’ll have trouble with? Or a teacher who always seems to be able to anticipate your difficulties. Well that’s what it’s like to work in Django. There have been countless occasions where I have exclaimed, after a bit of struggling, “oh, you mean I can just do this!” Just where you need it to be, it’s all done for you. You know the bits I mean: the tedious shit. The painful repeated Ctrl-C Ctrl-V crap that you go through every time you do a form.

Django is high-level, but in a low-level way. There’s no fucking about with shitty interfaces, arcane meta-languages and strange customs, just to put a website up that has editable content; there’s none of the horrible mess of PHP; there’s no need to download three thousand PHP files and work with a horribly complex interface just to set up a wee blog for God’s sake. With Django, you build things up yourself, in just the way you want. If you think this sounds like a lot of work, it’s not – it’s way less work, because Django knows roughly the kind of things you’ll be doing.

I confess that I never got around to trying a PHP MVC framework. No doubt all this great stuff I’m talking about is largely owing to the general MVC pattern, rather than to Django itself – but I’m not so sure. Django’s helper classes, such as forms, make the whole web development experience fun. Anyway, it’s so much nicer to write in Python.

Demon-Driven Enlightenment Bullshit

(This section doesn’t have much bullshit in it actually, but I couldn’t stand to leave the first two titles unbalanced.)

I’ve been blogging over at my philosophy blog, critique-of-pure-reason.com, which is why this is the first post here for a long – shit, it’s October already! That blog and the studies from whence its content sprouts have been taking up a lot of my time. Right now I’m studying scepticism, in particular Descartes, who suggested that for all I know I might be dreaming at this moment, or I might be the victim of a malicious deceiver demon who is creating all of my perceptions for me; so I cannot take my perceptions for what they seem to be, and so I have no ground for the belief that I am sitting at my computer writing; even though I bloody well know I’m not dreaming.

Now, you would think that “I bloody well know I’m not dreaming” would be absolutely inadmissable in philosophy, but most answers to Descartes seem to be saying something similar, especially those from Moore and Wittgenstein. Anyway, that’s enough of that. This is neither the time nor the place. This is the place if you’re interested. I did the blog engine from scratch in Django, by the way. Have I mentioned how much I like Django? Come to think of it though, the site’s sadly lacking in navigation, categories, tags and all that. Well, I did it over a single weekend so what do you expect?

So I’ve been staying up till all hours poring over philosophical papers from the journal Mind, just trying to prove that I’m not dreaming. It’s not as fruitless as it sounds though: mountains and valleys of thought are appearing from over the horizon. I’m moving ever nearer, exploring the foothills on my way to the dizzy precipices of [insert more bullshit here].

Not Enough Hours

And that’s not to mention all the music: saxophone, piano, theory and composition. And the maths. I’m working through a book of undergraduate mathematics, and Euclid’s Elements – oh and I’m half-way through a textbook on logic. Am I insane? Is this whole paragraph a cliché? I think it is you know. Fuck.

Logicomix, An Epic Search For Truth
By Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna

I have enjoyed comics since I was a child, when, fascinated and entranced by Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, I argued heatedly with my friends, who all preferred Asterix.

I still read Tintin occasionally, and I enjoy more consciously grown-up graphic novels, but I never thought I’d be treated to a comic-book account of Bertrand Russell’s quest to establish the foundations of mathematics. The idea of such a book is incredible, yet here it is, a story told passionately and illustrated beautifully, which does justice to the men and their ideas. And they’re all in here: Frege, Hilbert, Cantor, Gödel and Wittgenstein….

Read the rest on my philsophy blog, critique-of-pure-reason.com »

Anyway, I was looking at Mark Dooley’s biography of Scruton on Amazon and noticed this 5-star review:

This certainly is not my kind of book. It is a Christmas present for which I was asked so clearly it IS the kind of book enjoyed by the person who asked for it.

The world’s resources are limitless. I’m not joking. In a world of finite materials – and a finite 88 keys on a piano – resources are no more limited than are melodies and harmonies. Even if we stick to the Western musical scale, we will never run out of tunes. This is because tunes are not raw materials, somehow just there, waiting to be discovered: they come into being with the creativity of people.*

The same is true of resources. I’ve just discovered this wonderful phrase:

Resources Are Not, They Become

It was coined by economist Erich Zimmermann and has since been taken up in argument against the persistently rearing ugly head of Malthus (e.g. brilliantly by Thomas R. DeGregori [1]). No matter how many times Malthus has been disproven – by humanity’s ingenuity, and famously in more recent times in the Simon-Ehrlich wager – still he keeps popping up in various forms, currently in the guise of environmentalism. It’s boring to have to keep on defending humans from this conservative, misanthropic idea, but it’s all the rage at the moment, so I guess we have to.

The difference with today’s Malthusians is that they do not target the poor and the Africans and the Indians, as Malthusians once did. At least, they pretend not to. Their main target is the Western lifestyle, with its supposed over-consumption. But this leads them to attack the poorer countries’ efforts to develop too, for example in their opposition to the construction of dams to control the effects of monsoons in India or the use of GM crops in Africa. In their view of the world, people are better kept in their place, in small numbers at the mercy of nature. People are always the problem.

My Cat’s Electric Blanket Once Belonged to Alfred Russel Wallace’s Grandmother

I believe that people are not the problem, but the solution. People are not drains on society but contributors to it, and the more people there are, the more ideas we generate. The concept behind Resources are not, they become is that resources are not found but created, by the application of ideas. Petroleum was not a resource for the people of the neolithic. It only became one when we learned how to get it and use it, and when we had a need for it. Likewise, it will no doubt cease to become one when we work out how to use something better.

Like music and language, human society is open-ended. There will always be new music; in language there will always be novel phrases that make sense (I submit this: “my cat’s electric blanket once belonged to Alfred Russel Wallace’s grandmother”); and there will always be new resources. The ever-changing ideas and techniques of people continue to remake the world and society. It is simplistic and ahistorical to see the world’s resources as an ever-dwindling cake.

I think the big problems are under-development and poverty. And this of course means that policies are partly to blame. In the decades following Malthus India was seen as a lost cause, with a population growing so fast that it could not possibly sustain itself. Indeed, famine was celebrated by many in Britain as a natural check on over-population (incredibly, that odious idea lives on here and there even now). In the event, after suffering seven famines under British misrule, it was technology and complementary policy that ensured that, today, India has been famine-free since independence in 1947, even while the population has grown unimaginably.

I conclude from all this that policies seeking to prevent development – for example, calling a halt to the Gibe III dam in Ethiopia or banning GM crops – are, potentially, profoundly bad for humanity; and therefore that ideas and campaigns promoting such policies should be vigorously challenged.

Note: I’d like to provide some context here by adding that, by most measures, things are getting better for people throughout the world, as summarized in this collection of graphs from New Scientist.

*If you’re inclined to pick apart the analogy, how about this: the keys represent chemical elements, chords represent raw materials (there is a certainly a sense in which basic harmonies were discovered), and melodies and chord sequences (thus incorporating time) represent resources. I think that works, even without bringing in microtones.

[1] Resources Are Not, They Become: an Institutional Theory, Thomas R. De Gregori, Journal of Economic Issues 21, 1987, included in Evolutionary theory in the social sciences, Volume 4 by William M. Dugger and Howard J. Sherman.

Further reading:
The Simon-Ehrlich Wager on Wikipedia
The Doomslayer by Ed Regis, Wired 5.02, February 1997
The Post War Intellectual Roots Of The Population Bomb by Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer in The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development
No to Neo-Malthusianism at Spiked Online

I’ve got into trouble for my argumentative reactions to the statements of others. I might say “nonsense!” or “no, that’s not the way things are at all,” and then I’m criticized for my arrogance. Apparently I should have said “my humble opinion is – and you don’t have to believe it, because it’s just my humble opinion, I mean, what do I know really? and I don’t really like disagreeing with people, but I just want to say – and remember, I’m really not trying to force my opinions down your throat…etc” followed by concluding remarks such as “but that’s just my opinion, nobody is right or wrong here, it’s all just opinions, there’s no such thing as truth, I’m probably talking rubbish…”

In my more unguarded, undignified moments I might be tempted to say that I’ve fucking had it up to here with this shite. There is a timid fear of offending others, as if people are nothing but fragile victims of unwelcome outside influences with no power to fight back. That, to me, is disrespectful. There’s also a presumption that if I attack an idea you subscribe to, I am also attacking you. In response, I often say that if I didn’t respect your opinions and find you interesting, I wouldn’t bother arguing.

And since when did we stop being rational beings who could make a case for something and try to defend it, without taking disagreement personally? I am partly made up of my ideas, but they are always open to change, so they do not define me.

It is superfluous to say “I think…” or “I believe…” or “In my personal opinion…” or “IMHO” instead of just coming out with “this is how it is,” because when someone claims something to be true they are stating a personal opinion anyway, whether they say they are or not. We know that’s what they’re doing, so why should we have to hear them saying so explicitly? Is it because there is a growing suspicion of strong opinions, and an automatic accusation of arrogance? If so – and if this is a widespread reaction to argument – then it threatens the idea that human beings can know the truth. If you state something and you’re not lying, it means that you believe it to be true. The idea so prevalent now, that there is no such thing as truth, or that we cannot know it, must lead to a refusal to state opinions or argue against those of others.

There’s an important point here, one that this timid culture seems to find unpalatable. It is that if you have an opinion, and therefore believe in the truth of a particular assertion, it means that you assume that you have seen the light of the truth, and that all those who hold contrary opinions remain in darkness. In a world in which we can’t say anything is better than anything else, this kind of thing makes people uncomfortable.

But it’s also important to remember that you can hold strong opinions, really believing that everyone else is wrong, and yet not wish to somehow impose those opinions on anyone, because there is always the chance that you may be wrong. It is only absolute certainty that leads to arrogance and thence to the wish to impose those ideas on others.

How does one impose an opinion on somebody? It is by means of oppression, imperialism, authoritarian rule, violence and intimidation. The truly arrogant feel no need to justify their ideas with an argument: they force you to submit to them.

A world in which people stop standing up for what they believe in is not one I want to live in, so I for one am happy to go on making people uncomfortable.

I listened to a Radio 4 programme on the Great Man-Made River project in Libya. For the moment at least, you can listen to it here. It’s the mother of all water engineering projects, and as I’ve said before in this blog, I have an odd fascination with this kind of thing. Apart from anything else the project is beautifully simple, audacious and progressive. According to Unesco it’s the largest engineering scheme currently being carried out in the world, and it has also been described as the eighth wonder of the world. From where I sit in mean little Britain, which made such a cynical fuss about the Channel Tunnel and the Scottish Parliament building, it’s very inspiring.

In the sixties, during oil exploration in Libya’s part of the Sahara desert, they found vast quantities of underground water in fossil aquifers. As it turns out there are four major underground basins, three of which combined contain 35,000 cubic kilometres of water. That’s 35,000,000,000,000 cubic metres (what’s that, 35 trillion?)

Scratching a living from the desert ain’t much fun, so around 1980, “The people of Libya under the guidance of their leader, Colonel Muammar Al Qadhafi”, began looking into the possibility of accessing it. The Great Man-made River Authority was created in 1983 to organize the project, which was mainly about getting the water from the aquifers all the way to the populated coastal regions on the Mediterranean in the north of the country. The solution was simple: huge pipes.

The importance of the project for the development of Libya’s society can hardly be overstated. To create a thriving agriculture from a desert land is a beautiful thing, and despite the scepticism in the Western media – a few years ago I read a newspaper article that described it as a vanity project of Gadaffi’s that was doomed to failure – it has worked. Phases one and two are complete. Phase one provides two million cubic metres per day along a 1,200km pipeline to Benghazi and Sirt. Phase two delivers a million cubic metres a day to the fertile Jeffara plain, and to the capital Tripoli. Phase three is now in full-swing.

I don’t understand the attitude of the Western press. Here’s a quote from a website about the project which describes what I’m on about:

London and Washington circles were apoplectic about the opening of the new Libyan water project. The London Financial Times ran criticisms of the project from Angus Henley of the London-based Middle East Economic Digest. The pipeline, he said, was ‘Qaddafi’s pet project. He wants to be seen as something other than the scourge of the West.’ The Financial Times called the project Qaddafi’s ‘pipedream,’ stating that critics may be awed by the engineering involved, ‘But they regard the dream as a monument to vanity that makes little economic sense in a country where the U.N. Development Program says 94.6% of territory is desert wasteland.’

Am I missing something? It is precisely because Libya is mostly desert wasteland that this project is important. And as to the economic argument, here’s the quantity of water per Libyan dinar obtained for each of the available options:

(Great Man-Made River Authority )

Also online you can find the results of a study carried out by some American water engineers, which supports the economics of the project: The Great Man-Made River in Libya, Does it Make Sense? (PDF)

Listening to the radio program, several things were apparent. The people overseeing and working on this project have an innocent love for their work. They are engineers making life better for the people: sometimes it is just that simple. And they had an openness about the project which the journalist hadn’t expected in this demonized country. Also, it’s both an international effort and strongly Libyan: they’ve taken expertise from around the world (even American), and used it to learn from and develop their own self-sufficient expertise, to realize this very Libyan dream.

The river is a new lesson and an example in the struggle to achieve self-sufficiency, food security and true independence. No nation that depends on a foreign country to feed its people can be free. The Great River is a triumph against thirst and hunger. It is a defeat against ignorance and backwardness. It reflects the determination of Libyans to resist colonial pressure, to acquire technology, to develop, to improve their lives, and to control their own destiny in accordance with their own free will.

Ali Baghdadi

It got me to thinking about Libyan society, which is referred to by the Libyans as a democracy, in contradiction to our common understanding of the word. The theoretical basis is set out in Gadaffi’s Green Book, the full text of which is presented quite nicely at this site.

According to the website of the Great Man-Made River Project, the project was implemented by the people:

…the decisions for the implementation and funding of The Great Man Made River project were made at the grass roots level by the basic people’s congresses that were then compiled and made into laws by the General Peoples Congress. The project is funded directly by the Libyan people in the form of levies on fuel, tobacco and international travel etc.

On the surface it sounds like a good system to me.

Now, I am aware of the concerns about human rights in the country. Currently there is a foreign medical team there under penalty of death (see the Wikipedia article), and there has been much political repression, including assassinations of dissidents and exiles. The Berber minority was mistreated and derided for decades, and there doesn’t seem to be a place for freedom of speech or freedom of the press.

I certainly do not want to dismiss all of that, so I hope I don’t seem glib in saying that the theory on which the system is based strikes me as good. Gadaffi says that electoral democracy is not democratic at all, because it is so indirect. The solution is direct democracy, in which all participate in the study and debate of issues and policies confronting the nation. Partcipation as opposed to representation. This is the Athenian model, and was possible in city-states because of their small populations. But to implement it on a large scale requires the following set-up:

First, the people are divided into Basic Popular Conferences. Each Basic Popular Conference chooses its secretariat. The secretariats of all Popular Conferences together form Non-Basic Popular Conferences. Subsequently, the masses of the Basic Popular Conferences select administrative People’s Committees to replace government administration. All public institutions are run by People’s Committees which will be accountable to the Basic Popular Conferences which dictate the policy and supervise its execution. Thus, both the administration and the supervision become the people’s and the outdated definition of democracy – democracy is the supervision of the government by the people – becomes obsolete. It will be replaced by the true definition: Democracy is the supervision of the people by the people.

The trouble is, in real Libya this is just one side of things. In practice, it is not the theory on which the society’s organization is based, because overseeing everything you have the Revolutionary Committees, headed by Gadaffi and the military, with unlimited powers: a revolutionary dictatorship that refuses to wither away. So despite how attractive the system of democracy may look to a socialist or anarchist, it cannot be taken to be all-encompassing and the country in general cannot be taken to be truly democratic. But if the democratic aspect of the system were to be all-encompassing, and the military dictatorship done away with, it would be a true democracy.

Further reading:

Great Manmade River Project:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4814988.stm
http://www.galenfrysinger.com/man_made_river_libya.htm
http://www.water-technology.net/projects/gmr/
http://www.unesco.org/water/ihp/prizes/great_man/gmmrp.shtml

Summary of the Green Book: http://www.country-studies.com/libya/the-green-book.html

Human rights:
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde190022004
http://members.tripod.com/~sijill/

“Although it would be another 30 years before slaves gained their final freedom – when slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire – the Bicentenary in 2007 gives the opportunity to remember the millions who suffered; to pay tribute to the courage and moral conviction of all those – black and white – who campaigned for abolition; and to demand to know why today, in some parts of the world, forms of slavery still persist two centuries after the argument for abolition in this country was won.” (1)

I was reading the other day about the campaign that led to the passing of these Acts, culminating with the total abolition of slavery. I found it very interesting for two reasons. First, it was a religiously motivated campaign; and second, it involved possibly the first ever consumer boycott.

Hey Richard, Religion Ain’t All That Bad

All of the important players in the British fight against slavery were deeply religious. Of course, at that time, Christianity was a default position, and expressions of atheism were very rare. So it’s no surprise that these men were religious. But they were more than just religious by default: to them, their faith was absolutely central to the campaign and underlined everything they did in life.

“So integral to the British economy was the slave business that there were few men and institutions of wealth who did not want to invest in it” (2)

“Given how entrenched the slave trade was at the time, it is remarkable that a campaign to abolish it which began in 1787 succeeded only two decades later.” (3)

These campaigners must have been pretty special.

“It was essentially the alliance of Clarkson, an Anglican, and the Quakers, with their existing network of preachers and supporters, that made up the abolitionist movement.” (4)

The crucial characters, all of whom were pious Christians, and several of whom were zealous evangelists, deserve mention: Samuel Hoare Jr, Joseph Woods Sr, Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce.

I haven’t read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, but I wonder if he has considered examples such as the anti-slavery campaign. Surely it shows that religion is not always a bad thing? As atheists we might prefer that these men had been freethinkers, because that is how we are used to thinking about progress towards freedom and democracy. But history isn’t so simple: the Enlightenment was subtly entwined with religion, rather than implacably opposed to it.

Of course, their Protestantism could be seen as a stepping-stone to atheism and agnosticism, turning away as it did from the monolithic dogma of the Catholic church. But I don’t think even this perspective excuses Dawkins’ shrill righteousness. In Unweaving the Rainbow he says something like sometimes things go so far in one direction that you have to push extra-hard in the other direction to make some difference. Perhaps this is his justification.

Not-Buying Power

We’re used to the idea of consumer power in the modern world, with the anti-apartheid campaign and more recently the ethically-motivated buying of Fairtrade coffee and free-range eggs. It’s not something I’ve ever gone in for. Until recently I would have justified my rejection of it by saying that it would be an acceptance that my best chance of changing things is to use my status as a consumer, rather than as an active citizen.

But this is a perverse, indulgent, ultra-left-style argument. In the case of the anti-slavery campaign, there was a boycott of West Indian sugar, and at its height 300,000 people joined in. If William Fox‘s calculations were anywhere near right – that if 38,000 families joined the boycott, slavery would end – then it seems likely that the boycott must have had an effect.

1. http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/slavery/DG_065859
2, 3, 4.
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8749406

I was still in this phase when Brian told me his theory. I’m worried that I won’t do him justice here so let me just ask: Brian, if you read this, kindly correct me or elaborate on this in a comment. Essentially the idea is that simply because of the configuration of the city, different kinds of people live on top of each other and must be nice to each other to allow the city to run smoothly. Edinburgh, in contrast, has distinct, discrete geographical areas, each inhabited by one or two social classes – Southside students, New Town posh, small-businessmen and tradesmen, and so on. With the possible exception of Leith, there isn’t much mixing going on because the city’s configuration doesn’t enforce it, and there is a certain ghetto mentality. In Glasgow it’s very different, though I’ll leave it to Brian to explain exactly how.

So the upshot is that in Glasgow, because of the close proximity of people from different backgrounds, everyone is forced to get along, otherwise life would be unbearable and awkward, so in the pubs you will find students talking to electricians talking to lawyers talking to cheesemongers talking to professors of computer science. This makes for a wonderful atmosphere.

As Laura and Kris didn’t share our tastes, they were mystified, and demanded that he admit to liking something they had heard of. I joined in, pointing out that while I couldn’t do without the excitement of surprising, complex and weird music, I also enjoy Outkast, Marvin Gaye and the Beach Boys.

I wondered if he was being more honest – to himself and to others – than me. Or had I just lazily forgotten to continue cultivating my tastes? Or was Daniel perhaps a musical snob, as Laura was gently suggesting. Is musical snobbery bad? Is a fondess for this kind of music honest and ingenuous or is there always a contrarian mentality as part of it?

I’m the first to recognize if I’m becoming lazy with music. If I keep putting on the White Stripes instead of getting into that new John Zorn album, I know I’m just going over old, familiar, easy ground, rather than exploring and altering and improving myself. But I do believe that my increasing openness to soul, for example, is definitely a sign that my taste is maturing. The exquisite and deceptively simple songs of soul music are works of artistic greatness, all the more admirable because they are popular as well.

So even if one pursued an exploration of a certain kind of obscure difficult music with a contrarian motivation, that is, simply to position oneself against or different from others, it doesn’t really matter. Who cares why you get into something, as long as you gain some understanding and enjoyment from it. You may well develop a more mature attitude later down the line. I think this has been my trajectory.

As to whether musical snobbery is bad, well, snobbery is always bad and almost by definition cannot be justified: snobbery is always a presumption. Musical snobbery is the presumption that a kind of music is inferior because of its popularity. If musical snobbery were only the belief that some music is objectively better than others, then many people, including myself, would have to confess to being musical snobs. Stravinsky is superior to Black Lace, Neil Young is superior to Ronan Keating. This is not a matter of taste but of fact. But to dislike music because of its popularity is absurd. Hankering after the weird can be infantile.