As we continue to be plagued by sand-poundingly stupid whining about the blatantly imaginary "moratorium on dissent" since September 11th, here is a genuine dissenter, a poet in favour of the war. Frederick Turner is the author of, among other things, The New World and Genesis, two very fun and intelligent science fiction novels cast as epic poems (the first has an almost mythological feel, and a neo-classicist, post-apocalyptic setting; the second is set in the near future and concerned with the colonization of Mars). Mr. Turner is a poet of a regrettably rare sort, one who can make scientific subject matter strikingly beautiful without transforming it into sentimental nature mysticism. Goethe and Ted Hughes (scroll down to 'Pike') also possessed such talents. I personally find that such poetry can be eerily evocative even when it is undoubtably risible, as with Erasmus Darwin or James Grainger:

Tell me what viands land or streams produce
The large, black, female, moulting crab excel?

When it's acceptable to eat someone IX: You are a giant hyena.

This article packs an astonishing number of fascinating things into a very small space. In short, anthropologist Christy Turner suspects that the human colonization of North America may have been delayed by giant man-eating hyenas in Siberia, and that our ancestors may have domesicated dogs as hyena alarms. Turner's career seems largely to revolve around anthropophagy; it was he who revealed evidence of Anasazi cannibalism. All rather grim stuff; but readers sufficiently perverse to have read George Leonard Herter will take comfort in that man's confident assurance (in George the Housewife, I believe) that "Being eaten by hyenas is not as bad as it sounds."

Speaking of archeology, here is a researcher who believes that rock art sites may have been chosen for their acoustic properties. I will certainly be keeping the idea in mind come summer, when I resume my amateur field research in the subject.

Here's something quite clever, an apparently psychic website, and the fact that it's a cheap trick doesn't make it any less clever. Odious is a little faster with this sort of thing, and had the key before Peculiar's train of thought was too far out of the station. Here are some clues.
Hint #1 (stimulus): Think about the presence on the chart of numbers like 1 and 99 as solutions to the math. What are they doing there?
Hint #2 (really should be sufficient): Try doing it with a few consecutive numbers.
Hint #3 (insults your intelligence): do the same number a few times in a row.

I am reading Montaigne's Essays at the moment, and was struck by the timelessness of certain sentiments. The consolation of philosophy, the desire to remove oneself from lazy acceptance of popular thought into the realm of truth ("a fair, lush plateau from which one may gaze unhindered on all below"--On the Education of Children). Moreover, certain truths are both timeless and timely. In his essay On Presumption, Montaigne quotes the late Chancellor Olivier as saying, "The French are like monkeys which clamber up a tree and there show their arse." Given their recent monarchical behavior in politics, the truth of this sixteenth century statement is more evident than ever.

I recently got into a shouting match (in which I did all the shouting) with a good, reasonable, decent friend of mine who is absolutely blinkered on the coming war with Iraq. When I talk about the situation and reasonable responses to it, she talks about the United States' past iniquities. And while I don't think that they are as great as she does, I do accept some of them. We have done wrong. We will most likely do wrong again.

But this is not a reason to abandon our role as an agent of change. We have done wrong in my lifetime; we've been mistaken and nasty and even evil. But we cannot therefore abandon any future enterprise as tainted. We are not victims of the past.

The assumption is that the chance of doing wrong overwhelms all others. After all, once we've done wrong, there's no undoing it. And we are tainted by all the wickedness of the past; how could we, horrible foul we, hope to help anyone?

This state is a subtle and enervating form of victim mind. It leads to a comfortable state in which we do nothing but lament and bewail our manifold sins. After all, if we do not act, we cannot act on wrong motives. And who can truly say that they are acting out of pure goodness?

And this question leads us to the other prong of her argument: that the United States' are acting out of self-interest. Randians out there will say, "So what?" This is why no one listens to them. Motive is an important part of our actions. It is in motive that the morality of our actions lies. This is not to say that we can ignore the probable consequence; after all, if we act without regard to that we are not truly acting in the hope of doing good, but merely in the hope of avoiding iniquity. Moral action tries to bring about moral consequences. This difference is what Kant is talking about when he writes of an effort of will, as opposed to mere hoping. The peace protestors I've seen (and given the finger) fall into this trap. "Believe Peace" read their signs. "Let's all send out peaceful thoughts," one speaker urged. This is not will; will leads to action. This is useless, will-less hoping.

But hope never harmed anyone, and so the protestors embrace it. It is purely negative, in a moral sphere; it avoids wickedness while producing nothing. This inaction is the true council of the peace protestors. For this reason they view the downtrodden and poor peoples of the earth as purer than us. A people who has never had the power to act is the only people who can be free from wickedness.

The United States, as the most influential country in the world, are the target for all their spleen. Any action, if one traces the consequences far enough, will bring about iniquity, no matter how slight, and therefore all action is wrong in some degree.

This careful removal of motes, while being equally careful to ignore beams, characterizes a certain type of thought. The possible consequences of action are one's own fault; the consequences of inaction are not. After all, one has done nothing. This train of thought is merely victim mind, disguising itself as morality.

The fundamental belief of the peace protestors is therefore one of unexpungeable sin. They do not believe in redemption; they do not believe in free will. At bottom they believe that sins of the past taint all actions, that no action is pure, that self-interest guides all. And they believe this because they are in victim mind. A person in action mind uses the past for lessons on how to act in the present; they are too busy considering the present and its opportunities for moral action to engage in circle-flagellation.

Attack Iraq? NOW!

Dunphy has an article today on National Review about the attraction of victimhood, something he seems to find rather mysterious. When I was studying martial arts, the school would often discuss the philosophy which underlies the art. The aspect I find relevant to the article, and most often relevant to life, was a division of the possible responses to reality into action mind and victim mind. Action mind is a stance toward reality in which one considers what one will to with the situation, and is more useful in dealing with life. Why then would anyone choose (yes, choose) to lament and bewail one's lot in life? The answer, as has been made clear to me through some experience in victim mind, is that it removes any responsibility to act. One is a victim; there is no hope for one to save oneself, as one is simply tossed on the waves of Chaos and old night. Victim mind leads to fear, and often anger. The energy that one might use to reason and act is taken up instead by these emotions.

Often people in victim mind will say things like, "But don't I have a right to be angry?" I certainly cannot stop you, so I suppose you might consider that a right. But the question to ask is not can I? but shouldI? Anger and fear and useless snivelling may be a right, inalienable unto death, but we may choose not to exercise that right.

Anger is often cited as powerful, in various self-defense seminars I've attended. "Get angry!" the instructor will tell her or his audience. "Don't just freeze!" This is misleading. Anger is a result of victim mind. While an angry person may have a greater chance of fighting off his or her attacker (a blind rage can get lucky, just like a blind pig finds an acorn), and anger is certainly better than a hopeless acceptance of one's fate, both are inferior to rational thought and action. I find that anger is the resort of a person who does not feel powerful (in my experience, I got and get angry when I feel that I cannot deal with a situation--it is the Universe's fault anyway, and how can I be expected to deal with all this?). Before one can be truly effective in a self-defense situation, one has to believe that one is worth saving. Self-defense need not be seen as an animal instinct. It is a rational response. A self-defense situation is not one in which one excuses oneself briefly from humanity and becomes an animal. Self-defense need not be excused.

An attempt to excuse an act of self-defense is itself a form of victim mind. One is the victim of the attack; it forced one to become a beast, a horror, to go baresark. Nonsense. Passive resistance is an option. Death is an option. If one chooses to defend oneself with all available resources one can and should do so rationally, and be prepared to justify it. One has acted, not been acted upon, and any attempt to deny that is to attempt to deny responsibility. But if one truly believes in self-worth, one can do so confidently.

This all seems such a simple concept, that I wonder that many people do not accept it. But the lure of the utter passivity of victim mind is great.



All of which is to say that we must attack Iraq.
UPDATE: An excellent example of action mind may be found in Buffy, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I recently saw a commercial for the newest Jet Li movie; it's titled Cradle 2 the Grave, and looks to be a sequel in tone if not content of Romeo Must Die. I love to watch Jet Li, from his ingenuous Fung Sai-Yuk to his idealistic Wong Fei-hung, but why must he makes these quasi-blaxploitation movies trying to gain a 'popular' American audience? Call it kung fro.

Today is Charles Darwin's birthday! Let's all rejoice in the dissemination of quality genetic material, as well as in the culling of the herd. Not to mention pigeon breeding.

Failure to thrive: modern classical music

Several years ago, I attended a rather good performance of various contemporary compositions by a talented string quartet whose name I unfortunately forget. There was a pre-concert lecture, in which the speaker related an anecdote about a performance he attended in his youth. It was a piano concerto, and apparently the composer was performing from inside the piano, scratching with a piece of chalk on anything that would make a noise. Now I don't wish to seem a philistine, but for such an exhibition to be considered music, let alone classical music, seems not only absurd, but an insult to the superhuman efforts of great composers and performers throughout the centuries.

I am put in mind of this issue by having spent the afternoon re-reading sections of What to Listen for in Music by Aaron Copland. I recommend it highly, both to beginners and to those already fairly experienced in classical music. Copland's discussion of musical fundamentals (i.e. rhythm, melody, harmony, tone colour) is disappointingly basic, and those with even a very rudimentary musical background will find little enlightenment here. But his chapters on musical structure were highly helpful to me; his analysis of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata is an excellent demonstration of his principles in application; and the chapter on film music is surprisingly illuminating.

Copland's chapter on contemporary music is, of course, the source of the controversy. In general, I agree with his statements. He quite rightly encourages open-mindedness and fairness on the part of the listener: "The first thing to remember is that creative artists, by and large, are a serious lot-- their purpose is not to fool you. This, in turn, presupposes on your part an open mind, good will, and a certain a priori confidence in what they are up to." He also reminds us that the serious modern composer cannot simply imitate the success of his predecessors: "My love of the music of Chopin and Mozart is as strong as that of the next fellow, but it does me little good when I sit down to write my own, because their world is not mine and their musical language not mine."

Unfortunately, Copland's optimism in 1957 towards music's future is less tenable today. Classical music in the last fifty years has been largely a whimpering decrescendo, and whatever the critics may say, audiences simply prefer the music of the past. Russian music remained viable for a remarkably long time, but the black humour and cruelty of Shostakovich is not a facet of human experience on which most of us care to dwell for any length of time. Shostakovich was a remarkable composer, and deserves the highest praise for managing to function under the Soviet Union's appalling artistic conditions, but I pray we may never again see circumstances which would produce such an artist. Contemporary mystics like Arvo Pärt (my favourite contemporary composer, by the by) are fairly accessible, but losing one's direction in musical obscurity and uncertainty are part of the fun with them (as long ago in Debussy or in Strauss' Metamorphosen); and their emotional range is rather limited. The Atonalists have quite failed to blossom as an alternative musical reality, and their systems have proved best suited for expressing things like the squalid misery of Wozzeck or the ghoulish depravity of Pierrot Lunaire. Easiest to dismiss is the school of the blatantly loony: on Wednesday 2/12/03 begins the performance of a composition scheduled to last for 639 years. I never want to hear another whinging complaint about Parsifal.

Copland claims: "Contemporary music speaks to us as no other music can. It is the older music-- the music of Buxtehude and Cherubini-- that should seem distant and foreign to us, not that of Milhaud and William Schuman." Here I cannot agree with him. Western classical music is not an abitrary system. It is based fundamentally on mathematical ratios, and it is not merely cultural consensus which makes simultaneous sound waves whose peaks frequently coincide (e.g. a fifth) sound better to us than sound waves which are quite out of phase (e.g. a tritone). Though western classical music is not the only rational music theory humans have devised, yet it has developed in a remarkably continuous arc, from vocal polyphony, through the even-tempered scale, to Rameau's theory of harmony, to harmony's breaking point in Tristan und Isolde. It is hardly surprising that musical systems which start from principles other than the mathematics of how sound strikes the ear should sound odd to us.

Ultimately, the proof of the pudding must be in the eating, and the new music is simply not proving competetive with the old in the ears of modern audiences. I do not believe that blame can be placed entirely on the public's short attention span and shallowness. The ready availability of excellent recordings makes repeated hearings a simple matter, yet such easy familiarity is not increasing the new music's popularity. In his epilogue to Copland's book, Alan Rich writes:

If it's any comfort, half a century after my first hearing of the Schoenberg Fourth Quartet, I find that it's still "very tough"-- except that now I begin to make out the outlines of the work's principle melodies and to note when they reappear, as I do with a Mozart Quartet. The late quartets of Beethoven are also "very tough"

But the vast majority of listeners, even musically literate ones, find the close study of Mozart and Beethoven more rewarding, not to mention pleasurable, than the study of Schoenberg. Many even turn to foreign classical traditions, such as Iranian or Uzbek, hardly easy listening, in preference to the contemporary music which Copland believed should speak to us most closely.

I do not wish to seem determinedly hostile to modern music. Contemporary composers and those who perform their works deserve great acclaim for daring to attempt such an uncertain and possibly thankless feat as producing a new and original masterpiece. Serious listeners certainly ought to do their best to give new works a fair hearing. But the listener's time is not infinite, and if composers fail to produce works with the emotional range, structural integrity, and beauty of the old masterpieces, we the audience cannot be blamed for our continuing devotion to past genius.

Update: Here's an interview with contemporary composer Ned Rorem. An intriguing excerpt: "There's nothing new under the sun. And since nothing comes from nothing, we steal, and if you know you're stealing, you do your best to disguise it, and the act of disguising is the act of creation. If you're not smart enough to know that you're stealing, you're a second-rate artist, and you've made a second-rate version of some definable piece."

Chinggis Rules!

This splendid study has recently concluded that vast numbers of Central and East Asians share a single common ancestor, who may very likely have been the great Khan himself. Considering the many excellent characteristics of the Mongols in my personal acquaintance, I'm quite glad to see such fine genetic material well distributed. Many excellent Mongolia links are to be found here.

And speaking of animals, here's a very pleasant way to eat them, a dark, thick French stew courtesy of the prodigiously talented and charming Sasha Castel. We're eating it tonight; I've added nine cloves of garlic, and liberal amounts of whatever seasonings were to hand, as is my wont.

Culinarily, however, Samuel Pepys his wife put me quite to shame back in January 1660, when she "had got ready a very fine dinner-- viz. a dish of marrow bones; a leg of mutton; a loin of veal; a dish of fowl, three pullets, and two dozen larks all in a dish; a great tart, a neat's tongue, a dish of anchovies; a dish of prawns and cheese." Our gluttonous forbears certainly knew what was good, and they'd be'd rightly ashamed of our current whim to restrain ourselves.

Zoological happenings

Several interesting animal items have come our way today. The Indians are considering cloning Asiatic cheetahs. And the animal rights crowd will no doubt be dismayed that hunting with hounds may be the only feasible means of controlling problem mink populations. May their dismay be the greater when they reflect that (as Natalie Solent points out) problem mink populations in Britain are largely the result of 'liberation' efforts by animal rights activists.

And finally, a British man aspires to be shark food, although cooler heads observe that crayfish fodder will more likely be his destiny.

Update: And this is not to be missed. Pointed out by Dave Barry, the photo at the top should transform the debate over SUVs. The rest of the article contains things everyone should know about various critters' generative organs.

Something appalling:

The following piece of intel was provided by our undercover operative in the public school system. It is a representative question chosen (by us) out of many on a teacher competancy exam.

Question: In a classroom that includes a culturally diverse group of students, learning is most likely to be enhanced if the teacher ensures that:

A: Concepts related to cultural differences are de-emphasized and the ideas of cultural homogeneity and conformity are stressed.

B: Each student is encouraged to examine issues and materials primarily from the perspective of his or her own cultural background.

C: Opportunities for recognizing and valuing cultural similarities and differences are integrated into all aspects of the curriculum.

D: Student discussions related to aspects of culture focus on factual information rather than individual perceptions.

Astute observers of modern culture will no doubt guess which answer is officially 'correct.' Needless to say, it is not the one which involves factual information. But however noxious the implicit doctrines here may be, there's no arguing with results: judge for yourself.

Update: Our operative has just been told by her school's administration that she cannot fail more than ten percent of her students. "She cannot"!?! In a science class, a hard subject? What the hell has it got to do with her? The feckless little ignoramuses are the ones failing here. Even were our operative not an excellent educator, even if the teacher himself is partly to blame, those who demonstrate failure have in fact failed. Again, factual information seems to be deemed unimportant by those into whose hands the government sees fit to place our children.

Something which irritates me:

Many of you have no doubt noticed in the past year the media's laughable attempts to pronounce "Qatar" in a supposedly authentic manner. Why are they inflicting this on us? When conversing in our native tongue, we have no more obligation to pronounce voiceless uvular stops and adhere to barely comprehensible stress patterns than does a poor Parley-voo to know that, say, H. St. John Philby's name is pronounced 'sinjun'. Bruce Sterling predicted a while back that we'd eventually be talking about the renowned nations of Bharat, Zhongguo, Magyarország, Suomen Tasavalta, and so on; and talking about the gulf state of Gutter is certainly a step in that direction.

On a related note, why are we no longer describing a person's nationality with a noun, but only with a substantive adjective? Someone nowadays is Turkish rather than a Turk, Spanish rather than a Spaniard, a pastry rather than a Dane. We do still sometimes hear of Serbs and Croats, and a few things like 'Polack' can be abandoned as legitimately offensive. But a forgotten linguistic treasure like 'Lett' is to my knowledge merely archaic, not insulting. I can only speculate that those under the sway of current ideology think it more acceptable to regard a person's nationality as adjectival, a chance attribute, than as something fundamental to his character, and not necessarily mutable, as a noun might imply. All this is leading to things like idiot newscasters talking about 'Uzbekistanis', which is as ludicrous as my talking about my 'Scotlandian' heritage, or calling myself 'one from the land where the New Mexicans live'. Certainly the Mongols, in my experience, refer to themselves as Mongols in both Mongolian and English, and show no reluctance to associate themselves with the illustrious Mongols of history.