I have discovered that I dislike watching music competitions. I was trained as a classical violinist for thirteen years, spending five at the Guildhall in London, and have both watched and participated in many such competitions. It is very different when seen from the inside.
I value music as a skill I can perform for my own enjoyment. I select pieces for their structure, and their harmonic and melodic beauty. This is not how to select pieces in music competitions. You often must select from a list; and even when you do not, you must choose a piece that shows off your technical ability to the highest degree. So often you hear people playing pieces of music full of pointlessly complex little "fireworks" designed to demonstrate how proficient they are at martèle or up-bow spiccato or false harmonics. I have never found these pieces beautiful. Surprising, awesome, exciting, skillful, certainly; but musical beauty is rarely gained by the addition of physical exertion.
I do not believe that I am the only musician who was advised to choose these sorts of competition pieces. I believe the other musicians on TV shows that say they take this sort of music very seriously; but I think it is often their career they are taking seriously, or else they have had their ideas about musical beauty educated out of them in favor of 'modern' musical trends. I saw this happen a lot at the Guildhall.
This makes music competitions very unpleasant for me to watch. I can't bring myself to feel anything for it but boredom and distaste. They have the air of circus performances: feats of physical endurance and skill, but utterly meaningless.
Showing posts with label philosophy: popular culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy: popular culture. Show all posts
Monday, June 8, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
Liberty for kids
On Saturday 28th February, I attended the Convention on Modern Liberty, the basic premise of which seemed to be, By what means shall we attain more and greater liberty? I was one of the youngest attendees; most seemed to be over 30. And despite the fact that all of us were there to discuss and uphold the inalienable human right of individual autonomy, one implicit point of view seemed to prevail absolutely: children were not included.
Wherever children were mentioned, it was in the context of schooling. "Schools ought to instil in our children a respect for our traditions of Liberty in Britain". "Schools ought universally to send children to the Taking Liberties exhibition currently on at the British Library". "If schools would engage children on the subject of their own rights and liberties, I think children would be more interested and attendance would go right up".
I argued and fought against these wicked views at every turn. "Consider the irony", I recall saying, "of the child that does not wish to be at the Taking Liberties exhibition that day, being coerced around this exhibition telling him how free he is!" A roar of self-deprecating laughter; little to no self-criticism as a result.
Or else, "I think that if I were a schoolchild, and I were told to take pride in my own inalienable autonomy, my attendance would drop to nothing all but immdiately." This didn't even earn self-conscious laughter, but merely snorts of bitter amusement, at how obviously true my statement was, and how obviously unallowable to them.
As for the suggestion that children ought to be taught to take pride in our tradition of British Liberty: "If Liberty is, as you said earlier, the absence of an arbitrary and dictatorial power - do schools and parents not impose the most arbitrary and tyrannical of rule? How can you sincerely expect children to take any pride at all in liberty, when they alone of all British citizens are denied the meanest and least of its fruit?"
No satisfactory answer. A repetition that all that was suggested was that schools ought to teach British history more properly; a sentiment with which I concur, if schools are still inevitable, but my point was never met.
Other than myself, the only other person of the eight hundred or so to attend the conference to ever once speak out in favor of human liberty, rather than merely adult liberty, was the blogger Cory Doctorow. During the evening plenary, he announced (I paraphrase):
"If you want to keep your children safe from paedophiles, teach them not to submit to authority. If you want them to keep all their information safe, teach them how to use encryption tools. Don't restrict them, because that won't help them learn anything."
Thank you, Cory.
Wherever children were mentioned, it was in the context of schooling. "Schools ought to instil in our children a respect for our traditions of Liberty in Britain". "Schools ought universally to send children to the Taking Liberties exhibition currently on at the British Library". "If schools would engage children on the subject of their own rights and liberties, I think children would be more interested and attendance would go right up".
I argued and fought against these wicked views at every turn. "Consider the irony", I recall saying, "of the child that does not wish to be at the Taking Liberties exhibition that day, being coerced around this exhibition telling him how free he is!" A roar of self-deprecating laughter; little to no self-criticism as a result.
Or else, "I think that if I were a schoolchild, and I were told to take pride in my own inalienable autonomy, my attendance would drop to nothing all but immdiately." This didn't even earn self-conscious laughter, but merely snorts of bitter amusement, at how obviously true my statement was, and how obviously unallowable to them.
As for the suggestion that children ought to be taught to take pride in our tradition of British Liberty: "If Liberty is, as you said earlier, the absence of an arbitrary and dictatorial power - do schools and parents not impose the most arbitrary and tyrannical of rule? How can you sincerely expect children to take any pride at all in liberty, when they alone of all British citizens are denied the meanest and least of its fruit?"
No satisfactory answer. A repetition that all that was suggested was that schools ought to teach British history more properly; a sentiment with which I concur, if schools are still inevitable, but my point was never met.
Other than myself, the only other person of the eight hundred or so to attend the conference to ever once speak out in favor of human liberty, rather than merely adult liberty, was the blogger Cory Doctorow. During the evening plenary, he announced (I paraphrase):
"If you want to keep your children safe from paedophiles, teach them not to submit to authority. If you want them to keep all their information safe, teach them how to use encryption tools. Don't restrict them, because that won't help them learn anything."
Thank you, Cory.
Friday, February 13, 2009
A hundred years of arrant nonsense
I received an email the other day from a friend, telling me about this book, by James Hillman and Michael Ventura, entitled "We've had 100 years of psychotherapy—and the world's getting worse!"
To paraphrase the email, Hillman is a psychotherapist and Ventura is a journalist who has reported often on psychotherapy. These people believe that there is a link between psychotherapy and the worsening state of the world—and Hillman believes that psychotherapy makes people focus inwards on themselves, whereas in order to achieve any change, one ought to look outward on the world. He believes that one must do this in order to affect any change in the world.
I thought about this, and it occurred to me after a while that from this description of the book, every part of it is evil. Let's start at the bottom and work up.
Evil number one: Don't consider yourself, consider the world.
Hillman apparently believes that what is best for oneself is not the same thing as is best for the world. But, why would this be the case? Let us consider it in reverse: what's best for everyone isn't what's best for me personally. It should be easy to see that this is a complete contradiction; if it isn't best for me it can't possibly be best for everybody. It isn't best for everybody. It can only be best for everybody if it's best for me, too.
Therefore it follows that if all of us figure out what is best for ourselves, and then apply this knowledge in our everyday life, we will have what is best for everybody. Does this work? Invariably, people will end up having arguments. What one person wants will conflict with what another person wants.
Many people think that this is proof that humans cannot live together without conflict, and conflict is bad and mean and therefore human life is bad and mean. Another way of looking at it, however, and in my opinion the correct way, is that it is proof that humans are fallible. The interests of rational people—moral people—do not conflict. Rational people find mutual preferences. This happens more often than not in real life: I want to write a blog post, and my friend wants to play DDR. We do so. I am hungry, my friend is peckish. We cook dinner and I eat more than her. All mutual preferences, best for all those involved.
What happens when there are disputes? Well, rational people talk about them and solve the problem. And if you don't believe that the problem is mistakenness—ie, a lack of knowledge—consider this: there are small disputes, like, i want chicken and she wants pork. In such a situation, there are lots of very obvious solutions; maybe we will cook our own dinners. Or, I don't care so much about eating chicken so I eat pork instead, or vice versa. Or we both decide we like beef better than either chicken or pork. So on. Then there are larger disputes; I think it is wicked to hit children, and she thinks one cannot be a good parent without hitting them. Such disputes are the cause of considerable debate. They are difficult to solve. This is because it requires a lot more knowledge to solve a big and complex problem like that than chicken vs pork. The difference between a mutual preference and dispute is knowledge creation. And therefore, as people become more rational and create more knowledge, the less disputes and the more mutual preferences they will have.
Therefore if we go back to considering the situation in which everyone does what is best for themselves, there is no logical reason why this cannot work. Sometimes people will be mistaken, and they will solve the problem, ie, they will find a mutual preference. The end result is everyone getting what is best for them. The end result is a situation best for everyone.
So I conclude that it cannot possibly be true that focusing on oneself results in a situation that is not best for everybody, and that Hillman is wrong, and what's more he is deeply, viciously anti-human.
(Note: there are lots of other ways of showing this statement to be bad—I'm thinking along the lines of "Man cannot use his brain to think for his fellow man"—but I will keep those for another time.)
Evil number two: Psychotherapy is potentially meritous
This isn't nearly as bad as one or three, in part because it isn't quite as anti-human and in part because part of the point of the book is "psychotherapy doesn't work", but it's worth pointing out. Psychotherapy is utter nonsense. It helps people feel better about themselves, but so can joining a cult or snorting cocaine. Feeling better doesn't correspond directly to objectively good. Psychotherapy has no grounding in science and no grounding in logic. Any attempt at explaining that it works is at best inductivist—"We see that many people feel better after psychotherapy, therefore psychotherapy works" (See chapter 7 of the Fabric of Reality for why Induction does not work)—and at worst subjective—"What is best for me is what I feel is best for me." This denies the value of logic and reason. To take seriously any theory founded on such spurious grounds is to imagine that it is possible for induction and subjectivism, or rather, for mysticism, to work. The evil isn't that Hillman and Venture propose that psychotherapy is good—apparently they don't—but simply that they don't just dismiss it as the made-up whimsy that it is. They even go so far as to charge it with the source of the world's problems, again, a piece of completely made-up information. There are better explanations, one of which I will propose below.
Evil number three: the world is getting worse
This is probably the worst one, and it is bad. It's a part of the unnervingly common belief that we're regressing, not progressing. I hold that despite even the prevalence of wicked ideas like this, we are still improving. We live longer, we are freer, we have better technology and more of our wants fulfilled than at any other time in history. The worst thing about Hillman's theory is that it presumes the world is getting worse—the world is not getting worse. Humanity has no cause to hate itself.
(Again, this topic is a gallon-sized can of worms, and this is all I'll say on the subject in this post.)
To conclude, nothing about the premise of this book seems in any way good. I propose instead that the reason there are problems with the world is due to a lack of knowledge creation, nothing more, nothing less. It certainly has nothing directly to do with too much or too little psychotherapy. It's not a major cause. It's hardly a minor cause, except insofar as it is one of a multitude of mystical ideas that isn't helping us solve problems. A better title for a book might have been something like, "A hundred years of arrant nonsense—and we're only slightly more rational!"
To paraphrase the email, Hillman is a psychotherapist and Ventura is a journalist who has reported often on psychotherapy. These people believe that there is a link between psychotherapy and the worsening state of the world—and Hillman believes that psychotherapy makes people focus inwards on themselves, whereas in order to achieve any change, one ought to look outward on the world. He believes that one must do this in order to affect any change in the world.
I thought about this, and it occurred to me after a while that from this description of the book, every part of it is evil. Let's start at the bottom and work up.
Evil number one: Don't consider yourself, consider the world.
Hillman apparently believes that what is best for oneself is not the same thing as is best for the world. But, why would this be the case? Let us consider it in reverse: what's best for everyone isn't what's best for me personally. It should be easy to see that this is a complete contradiction; if it isn't best for me it can't possibly be best for everybody. It isn't best for everybody. It can only be best for everybody if it's best for me, too.
Therefore it follows that if all of us figure out what is best for ourselves, and then apply this knowledge in our everyday life, we will have what is best for everybody. Does this work? Invariably, people will end up having arguments. What one person wants will conflict with what another person wants.
Many people think that this is proof that humans cannot live together without conflict, and conflict is bad and mean and therefore human life is bad and mean. Another way of looking at it, however, and in my opinion the correct way, is that it is proof that humans are fallible. The interests of rational people—moral people—do not conflict. Rational people find mutual preferences. This happens more often than not in real life: I want to write a blog post, and my friend wants to play DDR. We do so. I am hungry, my friend is peckish. We cook dinner and I eat more than her. All mutual preferences, best for all those involved.
What happens when there are disputes? Well, rational people talk about them and solve the problem. And if you don't believe that the problem is mistakenness—ie, a lack of knowledge—consider this: there are small disputes, like, i want chicken and she wants pork. In such a situation, there are lots of very obvious solutions; maybe we will cook our own dinners. Or, I don't care so much about eating chicken so I eat pork instead, or vice versa. Or we both decide we like beef better than either chicken or pork. So on. Then there are larger disputes; I think it is wicked to hit children, and she thinks one cannot be a good parent without hitting them. Such disputes are the cause of considerable debate. They are difficult to solve. This is because it requires a lot more knowledge to solve a big and complex problem like that than chicken vs pork. The difference between a mutual preference and dispute is knowledge creation. And therefore, as people become more rational and create more knowledge, the less disputes and the more mutual preferences they will have.
Therefore if we go back to considering the situation in which everyone does what is best for themselves, there is no logical reason why this cannot work. Sometimes people will be mistaken, and they will solve the problem, ie, they will find a mutual preference. The end result is everyone getting what is best for them. The end result is a situation best for everyone.
So I conclude that it cannot possibly be true that focusing on oneself results in a situation that is not best for everybody, and that Hillman is wrong, and what's more he is deeply, viciously anti-human.
(Note: there are lots of other ways of showing this statement to be bad—I'm thinking along the lines of "Man cannot use his brain to think for his fellow man"—but I will keep those for another time.)
Evil number two: Psychotherapy is potentially meritous
This isn't nearly as bad as one or three, in part because it isn't quite as anti-human and in part because part of the point of the book is "psychotherapy doesn't work", but it's worth pointing out. Psychotherapy is utter nonsense. It helps people feel better about themselves, but so can joining a cult or snorting cocaine. Feeling better doesn't correspond directly to objectively good. Psychotherapy has no grounding in science and no grounding in logic. Any attempt at explaining that it works is at best inductivist—"We see that many people feel better after psychotherapy, therefore psychotherapy works" (See chapter 7 of the Fabric of Reality for why Induction does not work)—and at worst subjective—"What is best for me is what I feel is best for me." This denies the value of logic and reason. To take seriously any theory founded on such spurious grounds is to imagine that it is possible for induction and subjectivism, or rather, for mysticism, to work. The evil isn't that Hillman and Venture propose that psychotherapy is good—apparently they don't—but simply that they don't just dismiss it as the made-up whimsy that it is. They even go so far as to charge it with the source of the world's problems, again, a piece of completely made-up information. There are better explanations, one of which I will propose below.
Evil number three: the world is getting worse
This is probably the worst one, and it is bad. It's a part of the unnervingly common belief that we're regressing, not progressing. I hold that despite even the prevalence of wicked ideas like this, we are still improving. We live longer, we are freer, we have better technology and more of our wants fulfilled than at any other time in history. The worst thing about Hillman's theory is that it presumes the world is getting worse—the world is not getting worse. Humanity has no cause to hate itself.
(Again, this topic is a gallon-sized can of worms, and this is all I'll say on the subject in this post.)
To conclude, nothing about the premise of this book seems in any way good. I propose instead that the reason there are problems with the world is due to a lack of knowledge creation, nothing more, nothing less. It certainly has nothing directly to do with too much or too little psychotherapy. It's not a major cause. It's hardly a minor cause, except insofar as it is one of a multitude of mystical ideas that isn't helping us solve problems. A better title for a book might have been something like, "A hundred years of arrant nonsense—and we're only slightly more rational!"
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Israel, the Czechs, Fawstin and Dexter
I'm more than aware that most of the world hates Israel. This is because most of the world is anti-semitic, true, but there it is. And yet every so often you hear a few wonderful remarks from those people with the backbone to speak truth and take the consequences. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Geert Wilders. Ayn Rand. The Jyllands-Posten caricaturists. And if you're wondering what the Jyllands-Posten cartoons have to do with Israel, I'll remind you: Israel is fighting the terrorists and defending civilisation.
I remember last year noticing and being surprised and happy that Canada swore to defend Israel. This year, it's come from a most unlikely source: the Czech Republic.
"[Czech Foreign Minister] Schwarzenberg, a staunch ally of Washington, said Hamas had excluded itself from serious political debate due to its rocket attacks on Israel. He also indirectly blamed the group for the growing death toll, saying it put its bases and gun warehouses in densely populated areas.
I remember last year noticing and being surprised and happy that Canada swore to defend Israel. This year, it's come from a most unlikely source: the Czech Republic.
"[Czech Foreign Minister] Schwarzenberg, a staunch ally of Washington, said Hamas had excluded itself from serious political debate due to its rocket attacks on Israel. He also indirectly blamed the group for the growing death toll, saying it put its bases and gun warehouses in densely populated areas.
"Why am I one of the few that have expressed understanding for Israel? ... I am enjoying the luxury of telling the truth,“ Schwarzenberg told the daily."[1]
Damn, it's nice to hear that. At least not everyone is insane. Speaking of insane, Pigman and Dexter. Those of utter moral cowardice often seem to express some measure of horror at cartoonist Bosch Fawstin's violent anti-Islam art. Our government would probably classify slogans such as 'Give Us Liberty, Give Them Death' as hate speech and send an angry letter or two to Mr Fawstin. In response, and since I particularly like that poster, I invite those who dislike Fawstin's art and his character, Pigman, to consider Dexter.
Dexter is a serial killer. He's smart. He's also a forensic detective, specialising in blood-spatter analysis. He has a compulsion to murder—but instead of becoming a rampaging psychopath, he sets himself moral guidelines on who he is allowed to kill. He won't kill children. He will kill those who are murderers themselves and who in his judgement will beyond reasonable doubt kill again; those who pose a danger to innocent people. If I recall correctly, Dexter's first kill of the show was a man who had murdered some little boys.
I liked Dexter. He's like a superhero. He's like how Rorschach might have been if I had written Watchmen instead of Moore. He's not perfect, he is psychotic and compulsive. But he's also clever, and he's also moral. He forces his actions to be guided by his principles, and what results is a very human, believable character who in committing his murders does essentially nothing more than protect the innocent. It's probably good that he enjoys it; if he didn't, he might stop.
What Dexter's moral guidelines presuppose is that there are some people who deserve to die. Some people whose existence will do only one thing: harm innocent people. In the show, Dexter kills murderers. In real life, there are other threats to civilisation, too. Murderers not content with killing one man and instead working out the best ways to kill as many as possible in one go; and not for their watch or wallet, but because of their place of birth and the country in which they live. Rapists not content with picking off the most attractive girls, but choosing them on the basis of the colour of their skin and the western style of their clothing.
Give us Liberty, give them Death, indeed. Bosch, never stop drawing. Israel, America, never stop fighting. Let's make the best of 2009. Let's defend the West.
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