Category: Culture

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Preventing radicalization in universities

The government’s guidance to universities in England and Wales on the `Prevent duty’ contains the following paragraphs (120,1):

Universities have a clear role to play in the welfare of their students and we would expect there to be sufficient chaplaincy and pastoral support for all students.

As part of this, we would expect the institution to have clear and widely available policies for the use of prayer rooms and other faith-related facilities. These policies should outline arrangements for managing prayer and faith facilities (for example an oversight committee) and for dealing with any issues arising from the use of the facilities.

The use of the term `prayer rooms’ does make clear which faith is being targeted here. A few years ago, however, Bristol University’s Christian Union barred women from speaking unaccompanied at its events:

We understand that this [women teaching] is a difficult issue for some and so decided that women would not teach on their own at our CU:Equip meetings [its principal weekly meeting], as the main speaker on our Bristol CU weekend away or as our main speaker for mission weeks.

If such a thing happens again, is an academic or other member of university staff expected to note this affront to the `fundamental British value’ of `individual liberty’ and report the Christian Union for extremism?

 

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Paying for education

As seems likely, we in the UK are about to see the price of education hiked by another few grand a year. It turns out that the problem of what to pay for education was solved by William Blake a couple of centuries ago:

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
And in the wither’d field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain

or, if you prefer, fame costs:

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Theodor Adorno and Michael Gove

So there I was, minding my own business, when I discovered that the Frankfurt School was responsible for giving gay men and women in Ireland the right to marry.

“Well now,” says I, “what else might they be responsible for, these gnomes of Frankfurt.” It turns out they have been the source of the “ideas” for education policy in the United Kingdom for decades. From Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Cultural education spread with bourgeouis property. It forced paranoia into the dark corners of society and the soul. But since the real emancipation of mankind did not take place with the enlightenment of the mind, education itself became diseased. The greater the distance between the educated consciousness and social reality, the more it was itself exposed to the process of reification. Culture became wholly a commodity disseminated as information without permeating the individuals who acquired it. Thought became restricted to the acquisition of isolated facts. Conceptual relationships were rejected as uncomfortable and useless effort. The aspect of development in thought, all that is genetic and intensive in it, is forgotten and leveled down to the immediately given, to the extensive. Today the order of life allows no time for the ego to draw spiritual or intellectual conclusions. The thought which leads to knowledge is neutralized and used as a mere qualification on specific labour markets and to heighten the commodity value of the personality. And so that self-examination of the mind which works against paranoia is defeated. Finally, under the conditions of modern capitalism, half-education has become objective spirit. In the totalitarian phase of domination, it calls upon the provincial charlatans of politics, and with them the system of delusion as the ultima ratio: forcing it upon the majority of the ruled, who are already deadened by the culture industry. The contradictions of rule can be seen through by the healthy consciousness so easily today that it takes a diseased mind to keep them alive. Only those who suffer from a delusion of persecution accept the persecution to which domination must necessarily lead, inasmuch as they are allowed to persecute others.

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Things I have learned about Brazil in the last two weeks

I have now been in the middle of Sao Paulo state for just over a fortnight. Lessons learned:

  1. It is hot, like Africa hot, like you could fry Sally O’Brien on an egg if you had a stone hot.
  2. There are two big black cats around here that look as if their mammies were interfered with by jaguars.
  3. Brazilians eat a lot of meat. Round here Desperate Dan would be considered a perfumed ponce for having that effeminate pastry nonsense.
  4. Sliced, grilled cow hump is very tasty.
  5. Do not cross the woman with the machete who chops the ends off the unripe coconut so that you can drink the coconut water. She has a machete and she chops the ends off coconuts to make a crust.
  6. There is at least one person here who believes a chap can put coconut water in whisky and remain a gentleman. Such a man probably cheats at billiards.
  7. Everybody knows somebody who has been to Dublin, except for the people who have been there themselves.
  8. Brazilian academics will cheerfully go on strike for three months in pursuit of an above inflation pay claim.
  9. Brazilian academics have had their pensions slashed: they can no longer retire on full pay after thirty five years service.
  10. I might need to do a t-test on my sample size, but there is only one vegetarian in Sao Paulo state. Or all of Brazil, quite probably.
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Linebaugh, Taylor and Roddick for engineers

This is a set of brief notes which I issued to engineering students on a now defunct degree, as part of a class on the social context of engineering. This is converted from a LaTeX file which accounts for the lack of direct links to references.

Chips and ships …

At the end of the eighteenth century, workers in the naval shipyards of London were paid, if they were lucky, twice a year. Their wages were subject to various deductions for on-site services (the resident surgeon was paid from the men’s wages) and for disciplinary offences (football, cricket, absence from roll calls). Furthermore, wages were often not paid at all—in 1767, wages were fifteen months behind—and since sacked workers did not receive their back pay, there was little incentive to strike (The material on the London shipyards is taken from Linebaugh, 2003).

Continue reading “Linebaugh, Taylor and Roddick for engineers”

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Arise Kilnamanagh and take your place among the nations of the earth

Dublin, perhaps uniquely, has suffered mythologization by genius and by sentimentality. Caught between Leopold Bloom and the Leprachaun Museum (yes, there is), the city of Dublin, the living breathing people and the physical structures they live in and on, has fallen out of sight. Joyce and Flann O’Brien caught its speech, but the one did it so perfectly people are afraid to read him, and the other was so accurate they think the humour is a laughing matter; James Plunkett wrote Dublin on a human scale and gave it flesh and blood characters, but is little known outside Ireland. We have ended up with Bloomsday and Paddy’s Day, the first now more kitsch than the second.

Karl Whitney has now written a book that gives us back Dublin as a city, not the set of a novel, or the battlefield of dreams of some misty eyed tourist in search of their heroic and downtrodden ancestors.
Continue reading “Arise Kilnamanagh and take your place among the nations of the earth”

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Micks with sticks

When I was about ten years old, at a hurling match in Croke Park with my parents, a spectator nearby with an English accent offered an instruction to a defender who was chasing down a forward making a break: `Hit him you fucking coward!’ It appears that that spectator’s spirit is restless, and animating part of the viewing public.

Hurling is now available on Sky, despite the objections raised by leading members of the GAA:

“The whole point of the GAA,” he says, “is that we stand against capitalism, that money is a necessary evil. Our objective is the creation of cohesive communities, that is our target.”

It appears that hurling has become popular amongst sports fans in Great Britain, who have never seen it before, and are impressed. Great, and if this means Bath gets a hurling team, I’ll be delighted. The trouble is what people find impressive. One Irish-based sports website has collated some of the twitter responses, admittedly going for the more egregious, for the first game shown on Sky and now the second weekend. Some people are impressed by the speed and skill, some people are bemused, and some respond by describing it as `a pub fight on grass’, `a scrap doon the scheme’, `confirms my belief that the Irish are mental’, `superb combination and [sic] skill and violence’, and elsewhere `You can literally twat each [other] with a 2 x 4 piece of wood, smash a cricket ball at opposite players, rugby tackle each other.’

God knows the Irish are used to affording some English people an opportunity for a mix of condescension and amused tolerance of those strange foreigners (Brendan O’Carroll’s success is the principal evidence), but there’s no call for this nonsense. It should be possible to do better than this, and certainly not resort to admiration of the `violence’ of a highly skilled, and generally sportingly played, game.

For the avoidance of doubt, the only tackle allowed in hurling is shoulder-to-shoulder, not a rugby tackle and certainly not `literally’ hitting someone with a 2×4. Serious injury is very rare in hurling, because usually the stick takes the punishment.

Hurling is one of the oldest recorded sports in the world—it appears in Irish mythology dating back three thousand years—and is certainly the fastest field game. It requires skill, grace, courage, and is played by amateurs organized by an association which owns the third largest stadium in Europe. The Gaelic Athletic Association is probably the only major body in Ireland which is not an embarrassment, owing to its roots in every community, in Ireland and outside it. Hurling is unambiguously a genuinely special, uniquely Irish, event, and it is being turned into an extravaganza of Micks with Sticks, the professional wrestling of field sports, delighting some people who have decided to see it as an opportunity for delighting in Irish madness and taste for violence.

It takes a few minutes to find out something about the game. You might even sound expert given a little effort. With a bit more work, you can probably find a local club and see a game live. Or would that be too much like genuine interest?

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If we tax them, creative people will not innovate

In the 1960s, the top rate of income tax in the UK was 90%. Alec Issigonis had designed the Mini; the fastest bike on the road was built in Stevenage; the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were in full flow.

Today, the top rate of income tax is 45%. The Mini is built by BMW; the fastest bike on the road is Italian; Coldplay release a new album tomorrow.

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The creative process blog tour

In Darran Anderson’s words, this seems to be a Ponzi scheme of some sort, but Kirsty McCluskey has passed me the black spot, so here are my answers to the questions.

What am I working on?

Right now, I am working on an article for the Honest Ulsterman  on the politics of Irish memory of the First World War, overlapping with some ideas from an article to appear there on why Italian Fascists have a thing about Bobby Sands; a major overhaul of a set of notes for a course on Turbulence and Noise; a paper on fast methods of computing noise over large areas.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

In acoustics (science of) as a genre, my work fits into a certain niche between numerical analysis (using computers to get answers to hard problems) and applied mathematics (pencil and paper). When I write for students, I try to produce coherent narratives rather than a simple set of notes, and introduce the cultural and social context of the technology, through examples (Nazis in space), and encourage wider reading (Tom Wolfe, Jed Mercurio, Yeats and MacNeice in notes on aircraft control).

In my non-scientific writing, I have brought science and technology to fora where they might not otherwise appear, and a particular technical background to historical and political issues.

 Why do I write what I do?

Science: because I’ll be fired if I don’t. Also, it’s only science, or scholarship, when it is published so that other people can read it, contest it, and use it.

Non science: I think I have something different to say about some familiar issues, and something common to say about unfamiliar ones.

How does my writing process work?

In both cases, I write randomly, throwing down fragments, ranging in size from bullet points, as aides memoire, to full paragraphs. When I have something like a first draft, I print it out, delete the electronic original, and write it again. If needs be, rinse and repeat. The first pass lets me generate the material, and identify gaps in the argument, without being constrained by a need to produce good prose. The subsequent passes let me form a coherent argument, without worrying about the content.

 

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Roman a Clerc

[Declaration of interest: Kirsty McCluskey is a friend of mine, and I read the book in various drafts.]

Ruritania is not Greeneland, but the Catholic geology of both should be mined properly, if it is to be mined at all. Kirsty McCluskey’s new novelette, The Royal Confessor, is built around the relationships between the ailing monarch of Santa Teresa, his niece, and his Jesuit confessor. Fernand, veteran of Borodino, is prey to some unnamed terror which increasingly extreme religious devotions cannot ease; Sophie, his widowed niece, lives on the charity of the royal household, where the heir apparent Lucien is powerless to protect the island’s autonomy secured by Fernand’s skillful diplomacy decades earlier; Father Neri, the confessor, can offer no consolation to the old soldier, but duty obliges him to come when called.

Catholicism has taken on some of the otherness once reserved for distant tribes of which we knew only that we ruled them, and can be an easy gimmick for a lazy writer. This is especially true of confession (strictly the Sacrament of Penance), whether the use of the `seal’ to set up a thriller, or as a form of therapeutic talking cure (“Fr Eud will see you now.”).

The (A) point of Penance, which distinguishes it from secular therapies, is the relationship to the world outside the penitent. Simply unburdening oneself of one’s concerns is not enough: to be fully reconciled, after forgiveness, the penitent accepts some penance which is commensurate with the sin. Fernand has seen and done terrible things at Borodino; he wants his confessor to reconcile him with his God; his confessor can find no way to bring him to confess the sins which weigh upon him; no penance is possible.

Among the pleasures of the book, then, is an intelligent fictional treatment of a genuine dilemma, and probably one which has been set as an essay question in theology exams: how to absolve a penitent who will not confess his sin. Fernand believes himself damned, but cannot take the only refuge open to him; Neri does not believe him damned, but cannot offer him the only consolation of worth.