The Waning of Competence . . .

Rumer Godden is a novelist probably best known nowadays for the book on which the Powell/Pressburger film Black Narcissus was based (a film which, by the way, she absolutely hated). Her importance and enduring appeal as a writer – she died in 1998, aged 90 - is shown by the fact that her books are still largely in print.

China Court is among the lesser books that she wrote, but that does not stop it containing the most powerful picture that I know of in fiction of what it was like to be a woman of ability in a (and I hate using this word) ‘patriarchal’ society, thwarted in every department of her life, yet, like a flower buried under a heap of stones, struggling through in the end to a certain crippled self-expression.

It is not exactly airport reading – in a sense, it is a slightly difficult book. A bit – a little bit – stream of consciousness, with a cast of characters, each taking turns in the foreground, so that sometimes for a few moments it can be somewhat confusing as to where one enters and another exits.

The secret of the book, I think (and I am working here from memory, for it is a long time since I read it), is that for much of its length it consists of the reveries of an old woman who is dying.

Now it is not a feminist tract, in the sense that it is, in the context we are discussing, about an individual woman and not all women writ large. Just as with men - for every woman of ability there is a more than balancing gaggle of those of little or no ability. In positions that demand a certain competence in life, better the woman of ability than the man of no ability. And vice versa, too.

The idea has been advanced over the years that it is the hostility of men that has held back the advancement of women, and while there may be a certain truth in this, there is also a more unisex antipathy that affects both men and women, especially those of any perceived ability. Jonathan Swift perhaps put it best: ‘When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him [or her] by this sign, that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.’

The reason why I bring this up is the appearance under the influence of modern feminism of what I can only describe as the ‘token woman.’ You know the situation: you have to consult someone professionally on an important matter, and nowadays, six or seven times out of ten, that person proves to be a woman – and often – I repeat, often, not always – the emotion you leave the meeting with is that in some way you have been stiffed.

It is easy to understand how such a situation might arise: under pressure for gender equality employers, for whatever reason – maybe ideological commitment or fear of equality legislation or just the desire not to appear out of step – increase their recruitment of women. But often, one suspects, the emphasis may be on ‘women,’ rather than on the competence of such women. And in case anyone thinks I’m being unfair here, I am speaking from hard experience.

But, of course, I am being unfair. Go consult a solicitor or dentist or accountant or whatever these days and as often as not, irrespective of sex, you come away with the feeling of having been dealing with somebody not in complete command of their brief. I put it down to the rise of practices – as opposed to the old days of individual practitioners. Years ago you went, say, to the dentist – nowadays you go to a dental practice; and unless you have some special line to the head honcho you are likely to find yourself submitted to the doubtful competence of the latest trainee or recruit.

There was a time, I believe, when people in need of free and urgent treatment might submit themselves to the dental schools (and I am not singling out dentists here, for what I am discussing seems a more general phenomenon) to play a part in the training of students. Nothing it seems has changed. Only you don’t have to leave your own locality now – and you have to pay for it too!

There was also a time when, as the Americans say, hanging a shingle outside one’s door meant something. It was an indication of competence. All that, I would suggest, has changed. Nowadays, as with builders and plumbers and mechanics, the merits of professionals are more a matter of word of mouth transmission than any automatic belief in the charters and degree parchments with which they adorn their walls.

There are of course reasons for this - and I am sure it is not a new phenomenon; it just seems now to be altogether more prevalent. To go into the causes, as I see them, would be to overburden this mailing - far too long as it is already. At some later date, and should my interest in blogging persist, I hope to return to it . . .

Synchronicity or What . . . ?

I know it may appear contrived, but I assure you it is purely fortuitous. A few hours after making my last posting concerning the dangers of abstract reasoning unbalanced by common sense or intuition, I came across the following quotation. It is by Gerald Brenan, a once-famous author on things Spanish, and relates to Bertrand Russell:

' . . . his mind and work can be seen as split into two separate compartments. In one he is the logician and philosopher, the man of pure intellect who is completely cut off from all feelings. In the other he is the political writer, educationalist, teacher, prophet, moved by generous indignation at the follies and cruelties of the world, but also by a hankering for public esteem and applause . . . But when engaged in this way he was severely handicapped. Pure reason is not a good instrument for plotting a course in politics . . . though he was not lacking in the faculty of intuition he rarely gave it full play but drove his logical judgement through the maze of inter-related circumstances, simplifying everything that lay in its path till its conclusions no longer corresponded to reality . . .'

The quotation is from the second volume (Bertrand Russell, The Ghost of Madness 1921-1970) of the biography by Ray Monk, which is to be highly recommended.

Reasons to be Doleful . . . 1,2,3

Nobody saw it coming – indeed, no one could have seen it coming.

At least that’s what they tell us – the politicians and financial establishments and (with several honourable exceptions) the economists and journalists etc. etc.

John McFall, Chairman of the British Government Treasury Select Committee (and who arguably should be among the last to speak) says now that ‘even monkeys could have seen it coming’ – the ‘it’ being the financial catastrophe that has in recent times engulfed the world.

And how are we to explain the blindness of our own monkeys? Three possible explanations present themselves.

The first one (which, I suspect, applies mainly to politicians) is that they were too dumb to see what was happening in front of their noses.

The second is that they – or at least some of them (especially in the financial establishment) – didn’t want to see it. John Kenneth Galbraith has shown how the American Federal Reserve Board was aware of serious imbalances in the economy some two years ahead of the Great Wall Street Crash. Effectively the members of the Board did nothing about it - because they were afraid of being labeled as the men who brought the boom to an end . . . with all that might have meant for their future careers.

The third and most interesting explanation for our current situation is that some people who should have known better were simply blinded by figures and spin and academic bullshit and simply couldn’t see it coming.

Nobody has been more scathing of the deficiencies of academic economic theory than Nassim Nicholas Taleb – see his 2007 Financial Times op-ed piece ‘The Pseudo-Science Hurting Markets’ (www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FT-Nobel.pdf). His argument is that the business schools have consistently ignored common sense and hands-on experience in favour of purely academic theory - with disastrous results.

But one doesn’t have to listen just to Taleb. The story of Joe Kennedy and the shoeshine boy is too well known to bear repeating. But the crux of it is that Kennedy not alone escaped the Wall Street Crash but made a fortune out of it, not by reading spreadsheets or financial forecasts or brokers’ reports, but through the use of those two indispensable twins: common sense and gut-instinct.

The fact is that (and not just in terms of financial matters) the world has fallen increasingly under the sway of mechanistic reasoning. Scientists are trying to design computers that will replicate humans, when the real problem is that people are more and more coming to resemble machines. The world is being increasingly run by people who have come out of universities with their pragmatic and common-sense faculties clipped in favour of a disembodied system of abstract reasoning that works well on paper, but more often than not proves a disaster in the face of reality.

But that is all by-and-by . . . The purpose of this posting is to discuss why so many people of clear ability and intelligence seemed to go snow-blind in the face of the crisis that was rushing up on us - at a time when so many people in the street could sense that there was something wrong, especially in terms of the property bubble.

Whether we are anyway nearer an answer is something I really don’t know . . .

Apocalypse Any Day Now . . .

Even if you’ve seen it before, go out and rent Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto and look at it with fresh eyes. It is not simply a brilliant adventure story, it is also clearly intended as a parable for our times. The quotation from Will Durrant with which it is prefaced underlines this fact: ‘A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within!’

We are in the throes of the decline of western civilization. To get a sense of historical perspective the thing to study is the fall of the Roman Empire and the some six hundred years of war and chaos and terror that succeeded it. Of course to do this you want to study the traditional texts, which regard the whole period as a disaster, and not the new left-liberal historiography which sees the collapse and aftermath as not such a bad thing at all – something along the lines of ‘What the Barbarians Did for Us.’

Viewed from the traditional perspective (as Gibson seeks to view it) the reality of the current left-liberal agenda (a product primarily of an opportunistic coalition of militant feminism, the gay rights movement and a degenerate socialism) swims sharply into focus. Rather than a vibrant blueprint for a new society, it presents instead evidence of inexorable weakness and decay. Like those diseases that infect a weakened body, the left-liberal agenda and all its various –isms flourish simply because the dying civilization lacks the power of resistance.

Like ichneumon wasps that lay their eggs in the body of caterpillars, the left-liberals colonise the easy prey of a dying world. The novocaine they use to anaesthetise their host is ‘political correctness,’ under which people become self-censoring, afraid to say what they think, or even think what they think, lest they be accused of being sexist or racist or ageist or animalist or whatever.

There is an unprecedented pressure on people to conform to the now dominant view – one poured out on all sides from media and academia and various high-profile liberal opinion-formers. Nor does argument enter into it – venture a remark that offends against the liberal canon and the result is less likely to be debate, than a sudden shocked hiatus in the conversation and a hurried moving on.

There is a great deal of rage loose in the world – rage against banks and speculators and politicians. But the graph of social rage has been rising over a longer time-scale than that encompassing our current economic woes. We have had road-rage and trolley-rage and any number of other as yet unnamed rages in a world that for a long time has seemed increasingly on the verge of ‘going postal.’

It is my contention that this increase in inchoate rage is a natural reaction of people who sense, often without being able to put into words, the fact that the world – their world – the world of their intimate thoughts and associations and opinions – has been changing without their consent. People feel they are being manipulated, often without being able to understand the nature or purpose of that manipulation, or how to defend against it. And, deep down, they don’t like it.

More anon . . .

As you can see, I am ‘blogging.’ It is something that I thought about for years, except all the time there was - and still is - a resistance in me to actually doing it. It is not that I have nothing to say - for I like to think I have. Rather it is a deep-rooted distaste for the implications of the process in general.

Blogging, like so much else in the world, is inextricably linked with ego. We write, we speak, we perform – less because we have some vital truth to convey than to be admired, to shine, to test the strength of our influence.

And this is what causes a resistance in me: the idea that I might still share that desire to be admired – or even worse, that the world might view me as sharing it. There was a time when, of course, I did share it. But I like to think that that was long ago. But this belated stagger into blogging makes me ever the more suspicious of my own motivations. If I thought that at root I was writing to be praised or admired or ‘understood’ or any such thing, I would abort the whole thing now.

To repeat: I like to think that I am writing because I have something important to say and that needs to be heard.

Of course, it is impossible to exile ego completely – there are any number of back doors through which it can come sneaking in. If there are hiatuses in this journal – which undoubtedly there will be – it is less because I have nothing to say than proof of an ongoing struggle against the temptation to be clever purely for cleverness’ sake.

Either that - or the decision to choose just silence for silence’s sake.

The Way the World is Now

Walter Rainey writes: This is an initial blog. Randomly, by way of introduction, I reprint the text of a letter sent to the Irish Times within days of the attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001. The letter was not published.

Dear Editor, Just one question. Why did bin Laden, if it was bin Laden, carry out the attacks on New York and Washington? And I’m not talking of the ideological motive, but the strategic one. Even a child could see the likely consequences of carrying out such an attack - which suggests that the operation was mounted in order to provoke those very consequences. Nothing else makes sense.

The implications of this are that America with all its current military huffing and puffing is in fact dancing to Bin Laden’s tune - again, if it was Bin Laden. The only logical explanation is that the whole thing was devised in order to provoke America into launching a military assault and thereby destabilising the whole Middle East.

There is no doubt that President Bush is, as the Americans say, between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he has to be seen to do something to avenge the outrage and make sure it never happens again, at the same time he has to be careful not to do even more harm by precipitating a collapse of the precarious international balance. But that is what statesmanship is about, making the correct choice in tough situations.

The truth is that America is indeed at war, but it is not a war susceptible to the quick fix of blanket bombing or cruise missile technology, but rather a long drawn-out one of dogged intelligence work, limited engagements and assassinations. It is not a war likely to satisfy the American public desire for the catharsis of a ‘big bang’; nor is it a war likely to make headlines in the papers; nor is it even probably a war that America can in the long term win.

In the meantime, if there are any lessons to be drawn from history, one surely is that it is not a wise thing to let your opponent set the agenda in a conflict, no matter how otherwise compelling the circumstances might seem.

Yours etc.

Now to current matters: Here in Ireland we're still in the middle of the phony economic war. The government is doing nothing because there is nothing it can do. Instead it is disguising its inactivity by commissioning all these reports which it has no intention of implementing - outside of screwing the public service even further. Even if it was to implement fully all the proposals in the An Bord Snip report, it would in financial terms amount to little more than slapping a postage stamp on the rump of an elephant. Instead, those who would rule us are privately on their knees praying that there is a world economic recovery that will float our boat along with all others. Also, I imagine, they think they have an ace up their sleeves in that they believe that the EU cannot afford to let us sink. If they are wrong on both counts, then God help us!