Medieval miracles of multiculturalism
Matthew Crawford on our predicament
I first ran into Matthew Crawford buying his The world beyond your head for $10 from Book Grocer. Then I bought about seven or eight copies and gave them to friends. It’s a first-class tour of the modern world. Notionally about the harvesting of our attention on the internet and elsewhere (gambling, gaming, porn and politics), it builds its case from deep philosophical roots. Descartes and Kant are the bad guys in this story, William James, Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch the good guys.
I first learned of embodied cognition through the most thrilling few pages of the book in which Crawford describes high-speed cornering on a motorbike and how we come to use tools as extensions to our bodies (the philosopher Michael Polanyi describes as ‘in-dwelling’). Anyway, that ended in this essay of mine on embodied cognition and the Cartesian roots of our confusion.
Be that as it may, it’s been a little hard to know about Crawford. He has no social media presence I’m aware of and was hard to track down on the net. So I was pleased to find this now two year old essay and the fact that he’s become a quite frequent contributor to the cleverly named Unherd. It’s the best essay I’ve read in months!
The idea of a common good has given way to a partition of citizens along the lines of a moral hierarchy – one that just happens to mirror their material fortunes (as in Calvinism). … Very simply: if the nation is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, I owe it nothing. More than that, conscience demands that I repudiate it. Hannah Arendt spelled out this logic of high-minded withdrawal from the claims of community in the essays she wrote in response to the protest movements of the 1960s. Conscience “trembles for the individual self and its integrity,” appealing over the head of the community to a higher morality. …
Both Lasch and Arendt argue that black Americans serve a crucial function for the white bourgeoisie. As the emblem and proof of America’s illegitimacy, they anchor a politics of repudiation in which the idea of a common good has little purchase. This illegitimacy transcends any particular historical facts about slavery and segregation. Indeed it transcends America, as one can surmise by the ease with which American grievance politics has been exported throughout the Western world. …
There appears to be a circle of mutual support between political correctness, technocratic administration, and the bloated educational machinery. Because smartness (as indicated by educational credentials) confers title to rule in a technocratic regime, the ruling class adopts a distinctly cognitivist view: virtue does not consist of anything you do or don’t do, it consists of having the correct opinions. This is attractive, as one may then exempt oneself from the high-minded policies one inflicts upon everyone else. For example, the state schools are turned into laboratories of grievance-based social engineering, with generally disastrous effects, but you send your own children to expensive private schools. You can de-legitimise the police out of a professed concern for black people, and the explosion of murder will be confined to black parts of the city you never see, and journalists are not interested in. In this way, you can be magnanimous while avoiding the moral pollution and that comes from noticing reality.
With this clerisy’s systemic lack of “skin in the game”, the idea of a common good becomes a weak abstraction. Maintaining one’s own purity of opinion, on the other hand, has real psychic consequence, as it is the basis for one’s feeling of belonging — not to the community one happens to reside in, but to the tribe of the elect. If the ideal of a de-moralised public sphere was a signature aspiration of liberal secularism, it seems we have entered a post-secular age. Populism happened because it became widely noticed that we have transitioned from a liberal society to something that more closely resembles a corrupt theocracy.
LoLberger of the day
Monreale’s medieval miracles of multiculturalism
If you like mosaics, Ravenna is supposed to be the place for you. Well, yes, there are some wonderful things there. But I’d never heard of Monreale until I went there a couple of years ago. And there in the only city in Europe with two cathedrals, you’ll find the cathedral of Monreale. And where Ravenna’s marvellous mosaics are a joy to behold, they’re mostly in bits and pieces. No large-scale mosaic project has survived completely in tact.
But walking into Monreale Cathedral (begun 1172 completed 95 years later) and you’d be hard-pressed to tell whether you were in the 13th or the 21st century. Its wall-to-wall 6,500 square metres of gold mosaics are completely gobsmacking and, for those of you without a heart of stone, you should go. I could not believe what I was seeing and just wandered around for several hours — eavesdropping on some art history lecturer who was telling her charges all about it. I was particularly taken by the stories she told about women having a more prominent role in Sicilian society than they had elsewhere and of 12th century Sicilian multiculturalism.
So I was pleased to see this taken up in an article in the Spectator.
A fable for our time
In some respects [the first Norman kings of Sicily] followed the ways of the Middle East. They maintained harems and built superb pleasure palaces around Palermo Some of these … closely resemble similar structures in 12th-century Algeria and Egypt. But miraculously, the Sicilian buildings still exist. Nowhere else, in fact, does so much of the magnificence of an early medieval monarch survive. …
The Norman kings of Sicily were among the greatest rulers of their day. … Under Roger II’s reign Sicily, making full use of its pivotal position in the centre of the Mediterranean, was powerful and prosperous as it had seldom been before — and never has been since. His hybrid Greek-Latin-Islamic state was hugely successful. Islamic bureaucrats kept records in flowing Arabic, the bishops were Italian, French and English, and the Syrian Christian Arabic and Greek-speaking George of Antioch functioned as ammiratus ammiratorum, emir of emirs, or commander-in-chief.
The Cathedral at Monreale captures all this visually. Inscribed sometimes in Byzantine Greek sometimes in Latin. The reason for the difference? Some were executed by Greek masons from Constantinople (the Great Schism began in 1054, a few decades before the Normans turned up). The others by Muslim mosaicists. I don’t know about the religious sensibilities, but many of the mosaics illustrate Old Testament stories which are part of the Muslim tradition. You can spend an hour or so poking around these magnificent reproductions.
However, there was a catch, as Dirk Booms explained … ‘Sicily was a place of tolerance, but it was not a place of integration — except at court.’ The various populations — Greek, Latin, Muslim, Jewish — lived in separate districts of Palermo. Under Roger II’s son, William I, this patchwork society began to disintegrate. In 1161, there was a rebellion. The chief minister … was assassinated, the king himself was imprisoned, and there were attacks on the Muslim population, who fled into the mountains.
‘When the power of the king fell away,’ Dirk Booms concluded, ‘it was clear that there were underlying tensions.’ After William II died without an heir in 1189, Norman Sicily, after lasting for a glorious century or so, quickly fragmented. Perhaps its lesson is that a multicultural society can be remarkably successful economically and culturally, but without true integration it is vulnerably fragile.
The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
A great summary of all that’s wrong with peer review, putting me in mind of Michael Polanyi’s anticipation of the unbearable lightness of scientific careerism.
The quickest impression on the scientific world may be made … by serving up an interesting and plausible story composed of parts of the truth with a little straight invention admixed to it. Such a composition, if judiciously guarded by interspersed ambiguities, will be extremely difficult to controvert, and … may stand for years unchallenged. A considerable reputation can be built up and a very comfortable university post be gained before this kind of swindle transpires if it ever does. If each scientist set to work every morning [to do] the best bit of safe charlatanry which would just help him into a good post, there would soon exist no effective standards by which such deception could be detected.
The world Polanyi was pointing to seems to have come to pass, though, since one can’t prove that things have got worse, perhaps it was always thus. I doubt it.
Reviewing papers before publication, which was “quite rare” until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal.
Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades.
The results are in. It failed. …
What went wrong?
Here’s a simple question: does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published?
It doesn’t. …
If reviewers were doing their job, we’d hear lots of stories like “Professor Cornelius von Fraud was fired today after trying to submit a fake paper to a scientific journal.” But we never hear stories like that. Instead, pretty much every story about fraud begins with the paper passing review and being published. Only later does some good Samaritan—often someone in the author’s own lab!—notice something weird and decide to investigate. That’s what happened with this this paper about dishonesty that clearly has fake data (ironic), these guys who have published dozens or even hundreds of fraudulent papers, and this debacle:
And on and on
R. G. Collingwood on those feet in ancient time …
In the short history of this newsletter, I think I’ve already included an article on the song Jerusalem. James Connelly, who is working on a biography of the great and underappreciated early to mid 20th-century Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood, tells the story again and includes a letter from Collingwood who heard the song three years after the setting’s composition by Hubert Parry. It’s an interesting story but this passage from Collingwood caught my eye.
That Trafalgar Square show was really very good fun.[2] To stand, five hundred of you, on the steps of the Nelson column and shout Spanish Ladies to an assembled crowd of anything over five thousand seems to me to satisfy almost all the primitive instincts of mankind. I really doubt if I ever got more satisfaction out of anything. It would have been a striking success even without the final triumph: but that really was rather interesting. I think you don’t know “Jerusalem”. Parry wrote it shortly[3] before he died: and for the first time he absolutely succeeded in carrying out what he wanted. He was always brilliant at the pure setting of words: he understood what a pure melodic line ought to be, and when he wrote such things as the Lamentation in Job he could always be great.
But Jerusalem is even better than Job’s monologue. It is just right. Well, while we were singing our chanteys and folk-songs the crowd enjoyed it all very much, but they took it as rather an amusement: the little boys larked about and jigged in time to the tunes, and it was altogether rather a beer-gardenish effect. But when Jerusalem began everybody suddenly stood still and watched, and at the end there was a queer sort of silence. Kennedy Scott turned to them and saw what they looked like, and said “Do you want that again?” There was a “yes” from the crowd that came in a single clap, like the shutting of a door: not loud, but rather low and hoarse and uncannily simultaneous. So we sang Jerusalem again. Fortunately we knew it too well to need to see Scott, because by then we were mostly in tears. A thousand or so of the crowd were in tears too, for that matter. And then they say, bless their souls, that the English aren’t interested in good music. It was really very odd. You see the crowd didn’t know this was by a great man: they had never heard it before: it is doubtful if they could pick up the words. It just took them like that. I shall have to write my book about music now, in order to put that incident in. Anyhow, it justified the existence of the League of the Arts.”
The genius of John Clarke
Mark Twain: His Amazing Adventures
A Ken Burns doco on Mark Twain. Seems blocked to Australian IP addresses but works for those with who set their VPN to the US.
