I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that the impossible Isner versus Mahut tennis match has fundamental implications for the very harmony of the universe.
It is obvious that Isner and Mahut are perfectly-balanced anti-doppelgangers. Isner is the unstoppable yin; Mahut the immovable yang.
Tied overnight at 59 games each in the (un)final set, it is vital to the structure of the cosmos that neither win today. Instead, they should carry on until they reach a magic number, such as the balanced prime 1,103.
At 1,103 games each they should immediately retire from tennis forever and go to live together in a wooden hut high in the Himalayas, where they should spend the rest of their days playing out endless chess stalemates and drawn games of noughts-and-crosses.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Boo Two
“When England beat us they were incredible. Incredible. And for 20 minutes in the game they were perfect. Boosh! Pass. Boosh! Control on the chest. Boosh! The volley. Everything fast. It was like PlayStation,” said Slaven Bilic, referring to England's 5-1 thrashing of his Croatia team in September to qualify for the World Cup finals. “And now...when I watch them against USA...what has happened to your team?”
Good question, Slaven Bilic. It’s the one Fabio Capello is paid £6 million a year to answer; so it’s his fault. But they’re the same team and formation that thrashed Croatia 5-1 ‘like Playstation’, so it must be the players’ fault. They didn’t try hard enough, they have no heart. They tried too hard, became self-conscious and failed to express themselves. There’s something unique in the English mentality that means our players freeze on the big stage, which is why we never win the World Cup. France and Italy, the two most recent European winners, have been just as bad, so it’s just the way sport goes, nothing unique about us. Two draws against weak opposition is a catastrophic start. Unlike Spain and France, we’re unbeaten against weak opposition, so in context it’s far from a catastrophic start. If we can’t beat Algeria there’s no way we’re going to beat Slovenia; we’re exiting in humiliation. We always start slowly when we’re going to have a good competition – jeered off the pitch in the 1966 opener, scraping through in 86 and 90 – the shock will force us to radically change, improve and go all the way. It’s the usual: unconvincing progress from the group stage then a couple of good performances followed by elimination on penalties by Germany or Portugal.
England’s draws against the USA and Algeria thus far in the World Cup have been consistent with all of the above theories and predictions. Somebody will of course be right but they shouldn’t brag about it and say ‘I told you so’, any more than a sweepstake winner should claim clairvoyant powers. We are riding along right at the very edge of Time: behind us is an incomprehensible tangle of damn things; in front, the glare of the great unknowable at which the mind blanks. Helpless, we sound our vain opinions like vuvuzelas parping into the void.
Good question, Slaven Bilic. It’s the one Fabio Capello is paid £6 million a year to answer; so it’s his fault. But they’re the same team and formation that thrashed Croatia 5-1 ‘like Playstation’, so it must be the players’ fault. They didn’t try hard enough, they have no heart. They tried too hard, became self-conscious and failed to express themselves. There’s something unique in the English mentality that means our players freeze on the big stage, which is why we never win the World Cup. France and Italy, the two most recent European winners, have been just as bad, so it’s just the way sport goes, nothing unique about us. Two draws against weak opposition is a catastrophic start. Unlike Spain and France, we’re unbeaten against weak opposition, so in context it’s far from a catastrophic start. If we can’t beat Algeria there’s no way we’re going to beat Slovenia; we’re exiting in humiliation. We always start slowly when we’re going to have a good competition – jeered off the pitch in the 1966 opener, scraping through in 86 and 90 – the shock will force us to radically change, improve and go all the way. It’s the usual: unconvincing progress from the group stage then a couple of good performances followed by elimination on penalties by Germany or Portugal.
England’s draws against the USA and Algeria thus far in the World Cup have been consistent with all of the above theories and predictions. Somebody will of course be right but they shouldn’t brag about it and say ‘I told you so’, any more than a sweepstake winner should claim clairvoyant powers. We are riding along right at the very edge of Time: behind us is an incomprehensible tangle of damn things; in front, the glare of the great unknowable at which the mind blanks. Helpless, we sound our vain opinions like vuvuzelas parping into the void.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Humpty Dumpty
When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master...that’s all.”
This bit of Lewis Carroll is used a lot in internet bust-ups but often wrongly. Some seem to think of it as an extension of Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument, which demonstrated that a purely solipsistic language is an incoherent concept. In fact Humpty Dumpty is just a witty gag. A correct application in an argument would be to satirize a sophist who has deliberately equivocated between two different meanings of a word to make a single point, or who has wilfully misled by pushing the definition of a word beyond the commonly recognised boundaries of reasonableness, without indicating that he is doing so.
An incorrect application would be the circular argument whereby you assume a particular definition of an ambiguous word and, in the face of disagreement, produce the Humpty Dumpty. An even more incorrect application would be as a prop for the literalist idea that words have a single, universal, timeless definition. This is a category error and is obviously not the case because words change their meaning over time, have ambiguity, shades, double-meanings etc. They are frequently, perhaps usually, inadequate for containing reality. Commonly recognised boundaries of reasonableness are all we have. ‘Black’ and ‘white’, for example, are far from black and white when it comes to describing humans.
Poetry, most jokes and word-coinage would also be impossible if words were ‘objective’ in the scientific or Platonic sense, rather than the ‘generally agreed’ sense (thus ‘objective’ is itself an example of the problem). A good counter-argument to the misapplication of Humpty-Dumpty is another bit of Lewis Carroll. Who is the master here?
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master...that’s all.”
This bit of Lewis Carroll is used a lot in internet bust-ups but often wrongly. Some seem to think of it as an extension of Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument, which demonstrated that a purely solipsistic language is an incoherent concept. In fact Humpty Dumpty is just a witty gag. A correct application in an argument would be to satirize a sophist who has deliberately equivocated between two different meanings of a word to make a single point, or who has wilfully misled by pushing the definition of a word beyond the commonly recognised boundaries of reasonableness, without indicating that he is doing so.
An incorrect application would be the circular argument whereby you assume a particular definition of an ambiguous word and, in the face of disagreement, produce the Humpty Dumpty. An even more incorrect application would be as a prop for the literalist idea that words have a single, universal, timeless definition. This is a category error and is obviously not the case because words change their meaning over time, have ambiguity, shades, double-meanings etc. They are frequently, perhaps usually, inadequate for containing reality. Commonly recognised boundaries of reasonableness are all we have. ‘Black’ and ‘white’, for example, are far from black and white when it comes to describing humans.
Poetry, most jokes and word-coinage would also be impossible if words were ‘objective’ in the scientific or Platonic sense, rather than the ‘generally agreed’ sense (thus ‘objective’ is itself an example of the problem). A good counter-argument to the misapplication of Humpty-Dumpty is another bit of Lewis Carroll. Who is the master here?
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Platonism
Nick Cohen (whose link to the Yard sports the hover text description “Brilliant on everything except God” - a succinct, unwitting self-description) has a post about radical Islam and the right-wing loon Melanie Phillips, under which commenter James Bloodworth writes:
She might have a better argument against moral relativism if the biblical morality she was advocating had the ability to build a better society than secularism. History tells us otherwise. Her argument might also hold more weight if Christianity itself did not consist of an, albeit tamer, version of what the leading Al Qaeda thinkers are themselves advocating. That’s not by any means to equate figures such as Melanie Phillips with Al Qaeda, rather obviously; however, I suspect a fully Christianised West would be a lot closer to what the Islamists dream of than a strong secularised one.
Though he was occasionally prone to it himself on the issue of God (we all are sometimes, it’s unavoidable), the late Duck accurately argued that Platonic thinking is one of the biggest hindrances to understanding the world. James Bloodworth suggests that society consists of some degree of compromise between two opposed Platonic ideal worldviews: Secularism and Religion. This bears no relation to historical reality (secular liberalism is rooted in a world of Christians) and even as an analogy it makes little sense and has almost no practical application. History, being the sum of the affairs of humans, is unknowably tangled and complex and, as with America, whatever you try to say about it the opposite is also true.
I don’t know what, if anything, will kill radical Islamism (probably a mixture of moderate Islam, military force and some other fad coming along); but I’m confident it won’t be a post-religious secular utopia in which, thanks to the unanswerable rational arguments of secular liberals like Nick Cohen, Chris Hitchens and James Bloodworth, all religions are washed away, radical Islamism being just one more with them.
She might have a better argument against moral relativism if the biblical morality she was advocating had the ability to build a better society than secularism. History tells us otherwise. Her argument might also hold more weight if Christianity itself did not consist of an, albeit tamer, version of what the leading Al Qaeda thinkers are themselves advocating. That’s not by any means to equate figures such as Melanie Phillips with Al Qaeda, rather obviously; however, I suspect a fully Christianised West would be a lot closer to what the Islamists dream of than a strong secularised one.
Though he was occasionally prone to it himself on the issue of God (we all are sometimes, it’s unavoidable), the late Duck accurately argued that Platonic thinking is one of the biggest hindrances to understanding the world. James Bloodworth suggests that society consists of some degree of compromise between two opposed Platonic ideal worldviews: Secularism and Religion. This bears no relation to historical reality (secular liberalism is rooted in a world of Christians) and even as an analogy it makes little sense and has almost no practical application. History, being the sum of the affairs of humans, is unknowably tangled and complex and, as with America, whatever you try to say about it the opposite is also true.
I don’t know what, if anything, will kill radical Islamism (probably a mixture of moderate Islam, military force and some other fad coming along); but I’m confident it won’t be a post-religious secular utopia in which, thanks to the unanswerable rational arguments of secular liberals like Nick Cohen, Chris Hitchens and James Bloodworth, all religions are washed away, radical Islamism being just one more with them.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Why John Gray is not a sceptic
The Yard calls John Gray a ‘great sceptic’ and Jason Cowley in The Observer describes Gray as “Britain's most sceptical thinker”. Neither of these descriptions is accurate – the latter I can immediately disprove because in this very post I will demonstrate that there is at least one more sceptical British thinker than Gray, namely me.
Peasants and other rural folk often stop me on the lanes hereabouts, sometimes to impugn me and sometimes to ask: “Brit, what in your opinion is the most common error in general philosophical musings?” To which I reply: “Conflating the ability to doubt something with having a reason to believe that that something is false.” A common example amongst Philosophy undergrads is solipsistic idealism. The ability to doubt that the world I perceive is objectively real is not by itself a reason to believe that I am plugged into the Matrix being fed a hallucination of the objective world.
In Straw Dogs John Gray makes errors of this kind frequently. He is very sceptical about commonly accepted ideas but he only applies this scepticism to his enemy, ie. progressive liberal humanism. He makes many claims of his own, often about the distant future, to which he applies no such scepticism. In this sense he is a mystic.
There are two cornerstone arguments in Straw Dogs. The first is that western Enlightenment-based liberal progressivism equates to a utopianism as deluded and doomed to failure as other utopian projects such as Marxism and Nazism, because no matter how much technology and living standards might evolve, mankind cannot improve morally. (Indeed, Gray argues that the two twentieth century evils are the direct offspring of the Enlightenment – a somewhat cantankerous claim, simplistically expressed, which ignores the fact that western liberal systems rejected and destroyed both. In Britain Nazism was always a joke and in America communism was anathema),
Being anti-utopian and disbelieving in the perfectibility of mankind are basics of conservative thought – in this sense Gray is only saying what, for example, many of the commenters here say all the time: that Man is Fallen. I agree. Where Gray is unusual is in his insistence that perfectibilism explains all forms of liberal progressivism, ie. that any technological or social ‘improvements’ are driven by the hope of a perfect future. This looks like a sceptical claim but in fact it is merely a cynical claim. Cynicism is as much opposed to true scepticism as is wide-eyed optimism. At no point in Straw Dogs does Gray address the possibility that perfectibilism may be only one of many motives to explain the history of western ‘progressivism’, and sometimes not a motive at all. If I have a toothache I go to the dentist to get it fixed because I wish to remove the pain. I do not go with the idea of one day having a set of perfect American-style choppers. Some part of me may indeed wish to have such a perfect set and from an outside perspective the fix may look like a step on the road to it, but it was not my prime motive. You can ‘progress’ away from something as well as towards something. Gray does not acknowledge that amelioration is not the same as perfectibilism, but this is the difference between the medical researcher who aims to alleviate a particular form of human suffering, and the transhuman who wants a world of medically immortal superhumans. The same applies to ethics: the desire to correct particular behaviour which is perceived as immoral is not the same as the belief that we will one day live in a wholly moral world.
There have been plenty of reactionary thinkers with similarly cynical views of progressivism and bleak views about mankind’s future prospects. (I've just read Michael Wharton's excellent The Missing Will for one example). John Gray’s USP is an argument from Darwinism (this is the second key argument in Straw Dogs). Gray claims that virtually everybody has failed to understand Darwin’s lesson that man is just another animal. For Gray it makes no more sense to say that man can control his destiny – by which he really means achieve genuine moral progress – than it does to claim that a cow or a wolf can do likewise.
Here Gray greatly overinterprets Darwinism's predictive power. Darwinism can provide an explanation of the physical processes by which the human brain evolved. It is silent on what happens thereafter, socially and ethically. The human genome has not altered for tens of thousands of years, perhaps 100,000 years. But human social and ethical structures have changed many times, for better or worse, so Darwinism is just not a very useful tool for making vast societal claims, whether explanatory or predictive. It may be that Gray is right even in his bleakest predictions, but he is making unsceptical, highly debatable, often quasi-mystical claims. In this sense he is as much a Darwinian mystic as the daftest evolutionary psychologists.
Peasants and other rural folk often stop me on the lanes hereabouts, sometimes to impugn me and sometimes to ask: “Brit, what in your opinion is the most common error in general philosophical musings?” To which I reply: “Conflating the ability to doubt something with having a reason to believe that that something is false.” A common example amongst Philosophy undergrads is solipsistic idealism. The ability to doubt that the world I perceive is objectively real is not by itself a reason to believe that I am plugged into the Matrix being fed a hallucination of the objective world.
In Straw Dogs John Gray makes errors of this kind frequently. He is very sceptical about commonly accepted ideas but he only applies this scepticism to his enemy, ie. progressive liberal humanism. He makes many claims of his own, often about the distant future, to which he applies no such scepticism. In this sense he is a mystic.
There are two cornerstone arguments in Straw Dogs. The first is that western Enlightenment-based liberal progressivism equates to a utopianism as deluded and doomed to failure as other utopian projects such as Marxism and Nazism, because no matter how much technology and living standards might evolve, mankind cannot improve morally. (Indeed, Gray argues that the two twentieth century evils are the direct offspring of the Enlightenment – a somewhat cantankerous claim, simplistically expressed, which ignores the fact that western liberal systems rejected and destroyed both. In Britain Nazism was always a joke and in America communism was anathema),
Being anti-utopian and disbelieving in the perfectibility of mankind are basics of conservative thought – in this sense Gray is only saying what, for example, many of the commenters here say all the time: that Man is Fallen. I agree. Where Gray is unusual is in his insistence that perfectibilism explains all forms of liberal progressivism, ie. that any technological or social ‘improvements’ are driven by the hope of a perfect future. This looks like a sceptical claim but in fact it is merely a cynical claim. Cynicism is as much opposed to true scepticism as is wide-eyed optimism. At no point in Straw Dogs does Gray address the possibility that perfectibilism may be only one of many motives to explain the history of western ‘progressivism’, and sometimes not a motive at all. If I have a toothache I go to the dentist to get it fixed because I wish to remove the pain. I do not go with the idea of one day having a set of perfect American-style choppers. Some part of me may indeed wish to have such a perfect set and from an outside perspective the fix may look like a step on the road to it, but it was not my prime motive. You can ‘progress’ away from something as well as towards something. Gray does not acknowledge that amelioration is not the same as perfectibilism, but this is the difference between the medical researcher who aims to alleviate a particular form of human suffering, and the transhuman who wants a world of medically immortal superhumans. The same applies to ethics: the desire to correct particular behaviour which is perceived as immoral is not the same as the belief that we will one day live in a wholly moral world.
There have been plenty of reactionary thinkers with similarly cynical views of progressivism and bleak views about mankind’s future prospects. (I've just read Michael Wharton's excellent The Missing Will for one example). John Gray’s USP is an argument from Darwinism (this is the second key argument in Straw Dogs). Gray claims that virtually everybody has failed to understand Darwin’s lesson that man is just another animal. For Gray it makes no more sense to say that man can control his destiny – by which he really means achieve genuine moral progress – than it does to claim that a cow or a wolf can do likewise.
Here Gray greatly overinterprets Darwinism's predictive power. Darwinism can provide an explanation of the physical processes by which the human brain evolved. It is silent on what happens thereafter, socially and ethically. The human genome has not altered for tens of thousands of years, perhaps 100,000 years. But human social and ethical structures have changed many times, for better or worse, so Darwinism is just not a very useful tool for making vast societal claims, whether explanatory or predictive. It may be that Gray is right even in his bleakest predictions, but he is making unsceptical, highly debatable, often quasi-mystical claims. In this sense he is as much a Darwinian mystic as the daftest evolutionary psychologists.
Monday, February 08, 2010
A bug's life, John Gray, homunculus
Nasty headcold, poisons everything. This is a bugs’ planet; always has been. We are but their latest and temporary vehicles; no arts, no letters, no society… Sorry, came over a bit John Gray there. I’ve been dipping into Straw Dogs lately, perhaps the most highbrow toilet book on the market, trying to remember what I thought about it. I’ve remembered now: Gray is brilliant at gutting popular truisms, but then often makes an unjustifiably strong claim himself. This creates an unusual effect: you read through each passage, many of which contain wonderful, pithily-expressed insights, nodding and thinking "hmmm, too true, too true… ooh he’s got us there… Egad! Touché Mr Gray…" but then at the end the overwhelming feeling is one of profound suspicion.
For one example relevant to the bugs' life point above, Gray slashes at the western notion of the coherent Self, arguing that a Taoist-style flow of impressions, experiences and contingencies is a truer representation of reality. But then he asserts, boldly and unequivocally, that the Self is an illusion. Well this may be true, but then it may not. It may be that we are simply not very good at recalling and ordering things clearly, leaving the impression of an incoherent flow of impressions, experiences and contingencies, and this is the illusion. And there may be countless other explanations and interpretations, each consistent with some sort of Self. And if there is no coherent Self, how come we are able to look back on our lives with such bitterness, resentment and regret, John Gray? There are many such over-confident assertions in the book – some much more obvious than this one. Might write about it later in the week.
That said, at times like this one feels there is something in his final, final conclusion – the purpose of our lives is just to see. With a poisonous headcold one yearns for nothing so much as to be a lonely goatherd, healthy and free of the bugs in the clean wild elements, watching the sun circle and the white snow turn red as strawberries in the summertime.
For one example relevant to the bugs' life point above, Gray slashes at the western notion of the coherent Self, arguing that a Taoist-style flow of impressions, experiences and contingencies is a truer representation of reality. But then he asserts, boldly and unequivocally, that the Self is an illusion. Well this may be true, but then it may not. It may be that we are simply not very good at recalling and ordering things clearly, leaving the impression of an incoherent flow of impressions, experiences and contingencies, and this is the illusion. And there may be countless other explanations and interpretations, each consistent with some sort of Self. And if there is no coherent Self, how come we are able to look back on our lives with such bitterness, resentment and regret, John Gray? There are many such over-confident assertions in the book – some much more obvious than this one. Might write about it later in the week.
That said, at times like this one feels there is something in his final, final conclusion – the purpose of our lives is just to see. With a poisonous headcold one yearns for nothing so much as to be a lonely goatherd, healthy and free of the bugs in the clean wild elements, watching the sun circle and the white snow turn red as strawberries in the summertime.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Paul McCartney's brain
What must it have been like, I wondered recently, to have had Paul McCartney’s brain in the 1960s? Every few days you’d wake up, perhaps sit at a piano, waggle your head a bit, say ‘Wa-hey!’ and your brain would produce a tune for you. Sometimes it might be something like Rocky Raccoon or Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, but then on other days it might be something like Yesterday or Let it Be.
Being a music lover devoid of musical talent, I have always regarded with awe and jealousy those rare people who can write memorable melodies. Not just Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson or Mozart or Handel, but anyone who can pen something everyone can whistle. Like the great atheist Bjorn from Abba. Or Noel Gallagher. Or even Pete Waterman, why not. It seems a mysterious witchcraft: the ability to arrange a limited number of notes in a particular, original sequence and rhythm so that hearers can easily and with pleasure repeat that sequence whenever they wish (or sometimes, with great irritation when they don’t wish).
Clearly it is an innate gift afforded to very few. Ringo Starr in some amusing interview told how he would try to write songs but when he presented them to the rest of the Beatles they would inform him that he had unintentionally ripped off a popular tune of the day, and he would say “Oh yeah.”
We can confidently and unhesitatingly dismiss the ‘Outliers’ theory of that audacious charlatan and peddler of the obvious or empty Malcolm Gladwell, whereby he posits that the Beatles’ genius can be explained by the 10,000 hours of practice they had in Hamburg nightclubs. This is clearly nonsense.
First, there are countless thousands of jobbing musicians who put in the hours but never write a Penny Lane or indeed a tune a tenth as good as the most innocuous Beatles album track.
Second, the gift nearly always declines with years rather than improving.eg. Paul McCartney’s brain in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Generally speaking most bands’ debut albums contain their best tunes, and those artists with longevity (Dylan, Springsteen, Waits, Cave etc) rely on other qualities in their later years, ie. songcraft. Noel Gallagher had never even been in a band when his Muse provided him with all the melodies for the first two Oasis albums. It deserted him immediately afterwards, well before he had put in the 10,000 hours.
Third, Malcolm Gladwell has very silly hair.
Q.E.D.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Non-endings 2
Over here, Jon Hotten responds to the Non-endings post about his book The Years of the Locust. It is reasonable to say that Tim Anderson got life without parole because the Judge insisted on keeping his narrative within narrow limits for the purposes of the trial. When you're aware of the wider story, this seems terribly harsh. But who is to say that the Judge was wrong? Stretching the narrative would have been arbitrary too - you could, after all, start the story with Rick Parker's great-great-grandparents if you wanted.
But Anderson is in a real prison. Jon and I agreed that the arbitrary nature of narratives is a diverting philosophical game... unless the length of your prison term depends on it.
But Anderson is in a real prison. Jon and I agreed that the arbitrary nature of narratives is a diverting philosophical game... unless the length of your prison term depends on it.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Non-endings
As a boy I was very taken with the cliff-hanger ending of The Italian Job. The lack of a resolution seemed dangerous and radical, breaking the most basic conventions of story-telling. I remember quizzing my father about it at what must have been pretty irritating length. Since then I’ve often found ‘unsatisfactory’ endings (eg. most Cohen Brothers movies) more satisfying than ‘satisfactory’ ones. This might be an unusual proclivity but then again plenty of children who end their horror stories with “And it was all a dream” then like to add the undermining coda “Or was it?”
The Years of the Locust is a punchy true account of murder and corruption in heavyweight boxing’s sordid under- and indeed over-belly. It is by writer, multi-talented blogger and fellow Steve Bruce fan Jon Hotten. I heartily recommend that you purchase it forthwith – it has many fine qualities (there’s an extraordinary chapter called Noir Boxers which rips through a great tapestry of corruption and might well put you off boxing for life) and it has stayed with me even though I read it before Christmas, ie. in another lifetime. But for me it was especially striking for its perfectly inconclusive conclusion.
Journeyman boxer Tim Anderson shoots the odious promoter Rick Parker to death, confesses immediately, is found guilty by a jury and is sentenced to life without parole. By the end of the story it is possible to say, confidently and justifiably, that Tim did commit premeditated murder, and also that he didn’t; and that he deserved to be given life without parole and also that he didn’t. We are sympathetic to the killer but, bravely and rightly, Hotten refuses to turn the book into a “Free Tim Anderson” soapbox lecture. The key passage comes after Anderson is found guilty by a jury which subsequently objected to the harshness of his sentence. The trial of Tim Anderson had been a simple one. It came down to this: two men walked into a room. One man walked out. All of it was true. None of it was true.
Endings and narratives are constructions. It’s not that all narratives are equally valid (or invalid) and therefore useless. It’s not even that history is just one damn thing after another. The problem lies with the causal chains upon which narratives depend. Virtually everything that happens has multiple causes, the various degrees of importance of which are impossible for humans to determine with any objective certainty, particularly when considering decisions and states of mind. How do you explain the moment before an action? (Anderson shot Parker on the spur of the moment, and he also shot Parker because he had built up years of justifiable resentment. Somebody had to shoot Parker and Anderson just happened to be the man unfortunate enough to be in the position to do it. He didn't have to do it, but then again he had no choice. Part of Anderson planned to shoot Parker, but Anderson was the kind of person who could never plan to murder someone. But the law can't allow people to be murdered just because they seem to really deserve it, so the guilty verdict was the right one.)
Because of the multiple causes, the causal chain is incomprehensibly complex - a web, in fact, not a chain. Futhermore, the beginnings and ends of the chains are arbitrarily selected by the narrator and, as with climate change graphs, contracting or expanding the scope radically alters the appearance of the trend. Further furthermore, a range of quite different descriptions of the same thing can all be objectively true at the same time (for example, a piece of music could be described as a series of transcribed notes, or wave frequencies, or cultural influences, or aesthetic qualities) and people often slip between different kinds of description of things in their causal chain. But then again, narratives are useful, important and morally necessary, except when they are counterproductive, trivial and morally abhorrent.
The Years of the Locust is a punchy true account of murder and corruption in heavyweight boxing’s sordid under- and indeed over-belly. It is by writer, multi-talented blogger and fellow Steve Bruce fan Jon Hotten. I heartily recommend that you purchase it forthwith – it has many fine qualities (there’s an extraordinary chapter called Noir Boxers which rips through a great tapestry of corruption and might well put you off boxing for life) and it has stayed with me even though I read it before Christmas, ie. in another lifetime. But for me it was especially striking for its perfectly inconclusive conclusion.
Journeyman boxer Tim Anderson shoots the odious promoter Rick Parker to death, confesses immediately, is found guilty by a jury and is sentenced to life without parole. By the end of the story it is possible to say, confidently and justifiably, that Tim did commit premeditated murder, and also that he didn’t; and that he deserved to be given life without parole and also that he didn’t. We are sympathetic to the killer but, bravely and rightly, Hotten refuses to turn the book into a “Free Tim Anderson” soapbox lecture. The key passage comes after Anderson is found guilty by a jury which subsequently objected to the harshness of his sentence. The trial of Tim Anderson had been a simple one. It came down to this: two men walked into a room. One man walked out. All of it was true. None of it was true.
Endings and narratives are constructions. It’s not that all narratives are equally valid (or invalid) and therefore useless. It’s not even that history is just one damn thing after another. The problem lies with the causal chains upon which narratives depend. Virtually everything that happens has multiple causes, the various degrees of importance of which are impossible for humans to determine with any objective certainty, particularly when considering decisions and states of mind. How do you explain the moment before an action? (Anderson shot Parker on the spur of the moment, and he also shot Parker because he had built up years of justifiable resentment. Somebody had to shoot Parker and Anderson just happened to be the man unfortunate enough to be in the position to do it. He didn't have to do it, but then again he had no choice. Part of Anderson planned to shoot Parker, but Anderson was the kind of person who could never plan to murder someone. But the law can't allow people to be murdered just because they seem to really deserve it, so the guilty verdict was the right one.)
Because of the multiple causes, the causal chain is incomprehensibly complex - a web, in fact, not a chain. Futhermore, the beginnings and ends of the chains are arbitrarily selected by the narrator and, as with climate change graphs, contracting or expanding the scope radically alters the appearance of the trend. Further furthermore, a range of quite different descriptions of the same thing can all be objectively true at the same time (for example, a piece of music could be described as a series of transcribed notes, or wave frequencies, or cultural influences, or aesthetic qualities) and people often slip between different kinds of description of things in their causal chain. But then again, narratives are useful, important and morally necessary, except when they are counterproductive, trivial and morally abhorrent.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Falls the Shadow 2: Henry’s handball
Terrific lot of fuss about Thierry Henry’s handball, wasn’t there? The interesting thing for me was the fact that he was actually able to handle it so quickly and so skilfully.
There are a thousand incidents of cheating in any football match, but there are also different categories of cheating. This is tied to the strange internal moralities of sport, but also to what we might call, until I can think of something better, a sport’s ‘frame of reference.’
If you’ve played football you’ll know that deliberate handballs are very rare. Players who will happily cheat in other ways – such as shirt-pulling or kicking a tricky little bastard’s legs away – won’t dream of handballing. This is because when playing football your whole frame of reference is based on touching the ball with any part of your body except your hand. It’s actually very difficult to commit a handball, because your instincts are trained not to. Whereas shirt-pulling and kicking legs are just natural extensions of the physical side of the game, handball goes against the very Platonic (!) ‘footballiness’ of football.
Or to put it another way, kicking someone is a hot foul – an extension of passion and aggression - whereas handballing is a cold foul, a professional one.
Perhaps this is why there was so much fuss, and why we still resent Maradona’s Hand of God incident. Had Henry or Maradona scored critical goals by cheating in more ‘normal’ ways, such as pushing a defender in the back to win the ball, we’d just let it go.
In the split second between the decision and the action falls the shadow. Henry mastered that split second for dark and dastardly purposes. This is cold and clever and uncanny - and we don’t like it.
There are a thousand incidents of cheating in any football match, but there are also different categories of cheating. This is tied to the strange internal moralities of sport, but also to what we might call, until I can think of something better, a sport’s ‘frame of reference.’
If you’ve played football you’ll know that deliberate handballs are very rare. Players who will happily cheat in other ways – such as shirt-pulling or kicking a tricky little bastard’s legs away – won’t dream of handballing. This is because when playing football your whole frame of reference is based on touching the ball with any part of your body except your hand. It’s actually very difficult to commit a handball, because your instincts are trained not to. Whereas shirt-pulling and kicking legs are just natural extensions of the physical side of the game, handball goes against the very Platonic (!) ‘footballiness’ of football.
Or to put it another way, kicking someone is a hot foul – an extension of passion and aggression - whereas handballing is a cold foul, a professional one.
Perhaps this is why there was so much fuss, and why we still resent Maradona’s Hand of God incident. Had Henry or Maradona scored critical goals by cheating in more ‘normal’ ways, such as pushing a defender in the back to win the ball, we’d just let it go.
In the split second between the decision and the action falls the shadow. Henry mastered that split second for dark and dastardly purposes. This is cold and clever and uncanny - and we don’t like it.
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