Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Fraternal assistance
(If you don't vote you can't complain about the results, you know. You'll have to endure month after month of a calendar above your desk or lab bench or kitchen table with cartoons with labels explaining what each element in them is supposed to represent. Maybe James could do a meta-cartoon with a character labelled 'subtle cartoonist' telling a character labelled 'unsubtle cartoonist' why cartoons with labels are so 18th Century.)
Labels: self-promotion
Spreading our Genres
Now they tell us
Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion is, for those caught in the crossfire, intellectually unsatisfying. How can one of the greatest scientific minds of our era be so simplistic? Because - according to The Case For God - Dawkins is a biologist. Had he been a physicist he would not have stumbled so imprudently into his illiberal prejudices. Physicists have long resigned themselves to the unknowableness of the world while "some biologists", Armstrong observes, "whose discipline has not yet experienced a major reversal, have remained confident of their capacity to discover absolute truth".I've typed that out in full, just so that people can point at it and laugh. Onward:
The God Delusion is deficient on two counts. First, it attacks a very particular form of religion, claiming it to be representative of of any experience of spirituality or transcendence. In fact there are very few Creationists [...]That would be the same book [i.e. The God Delusion] whose very first chapter is titled 'A Deeply Religious Non-Believer'? The book that says (about creationist drivel being taught in state-supported schools): 'The implication that the scriptures provide a literal account of geological history would make any reputable theologian wince. My friend Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, and I wrote a joint letter to Tony Blair, and we got it signed by eight bishops and nine senior scientists.'? Yup, same book. I could go on, but I won't. Dolan does:
The second deficiency [...] is a blind faith in the Supreme Truth of Science. If only! [Blah world wars Holocaust Aids blah can't even cure the common cold blah poverty blah now they're saying tomatoes cause Alzheimers blah blah.] And science is no more immune to opinion, fashion and political bias than any other endeavour of humankind. (Evidence of that, I would suggest, is Dawkins's 1976 The Selfish Gene, ushering in the Thatcherite era. The clue is in the title.)If there's one infallible sign of not having a clue about, and not having read, The Selfish Gene, it's this smug, stupid remark. The clue is, indeed, in the title, but it has whizzed past Dolan's head.
Armstrong - according to Dolan, anyway - blames literalist fundamentalism on the Enlightenment, when religious people mistakenly tried to 'mimic science's objectivity':
For millennia before, no-one had taken any religious text as being literally true - or "gospel", in the modern sense of the word.Bless.
Newspaper of record notices SF author actually good
The Prophet's Suitcase
Kids these days - heck, anyone under thirty - in Britain, France and a handful of other countries, probably think it's a small but normal part of the gaiety of nations to have Trotskyists running for President, sponsoring big talk-fests of leftwing politicians and trade unionists and public intellectuals, performing stand-up comedy, sitting on the executives of major unions, getting elected to the European Parliament, bringing about the fall of an Italian government, and so on and so forth, all the while upholding the charming old Trotskyist customs of selling newspapers, splitting and fusing and underestimating the peasantry.
It wasn't always like this. In the 1950s and 1960s even the largest Trotskyist organizations (apart from the one in Sri Lanka, which quite uniquely was the mass working-class party in the country, and one in Britain, the Socialist Labour League (SLL), which had about a thousand) had memberships in the hundreds, and the rest had tens at most. So the past few decades could be counted a success - 'the resurgence of the political formations associated with [Trotsky's] name', as a New Left Books back cover once pompously put it.
The man most responsible for that success, small as it was, being a lot smaller than it could have been was Gerry Healy, the very man who had built the SLL. Remarking on Healy's death in December 1989, the anarchist Nicolas Walter said to me that Healy was the most evil person ever to come out of the Marxist movement. What about Ceausescu (then in the news), I asked? I don't recall Walter's reply, by I do remember the impatient look and gesture that accompanied it. Britain's best-known anarchist wasn't given to cutting actual Communist tyrants any slack, but my guess is that he thought Ceausescu's character was better than Healy's. If so, he may have had a point. Say what you like about Ceausescu, he railed at his accusers, stood by his Elena, and died like a man.
Wohlforth, it's fair to say, doesn't use his memoir to shine a flattering light on himself. He adds little to the exposure of Healy, of whom enough and more than enough has been said. As early as 1959, one of Healy's biggest catches - Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker journalist who'd covered the Hungarian uprising of 1956, found his reports spiked or distorted, and broken with the Communist Party as a result - gave a disturbing account of Healy's violence, lying and paranoia. Unfortunately it took another quarter of a century before the whole farrago imploded.
No, what's actually disillusioning is seeing the relatively decent characters in this long-running farce - Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, Joseph Hansen, George Novack, even James P. Cannon (once described as 'a Healy who never found his Gadaffi') not to mention Wohlforth and his comrades and rivals, from James Robertson to Lyndon Larouche portrayed as little more than assiduous writers of internal documents that tried and failed to interpret a world being changed by others.
A perennial problem of Trotskyism has been trying to understand the post-WW2 social revolutions within the framework of Trotskyist theory. If you actually look at what actually happened, whether it's Czechoslovakia or Cuba or South Yemen, it's not at all hard to understand what was going on. Understanding it and making your understanding compatible with Trotskyist theory is an exercise in futility, like squaring the circle or getting a dent out of a ping-pong ball. I once made the effort, ploughing through: a whole load of the American SWP's and the Fourth International's internal documents reprinted decades later as 'Education for Socialists' bulletins; one of Wohlforth's tyro attempts; and a later document, 'The Theory of Structural Assimilation', which he authored on realising the first one didn't work. How depressing to see how Wohlforth himself had set about the task:
'That winter I took a suitcase full of old documents to a Miami Beach kosher hotel.' (p113)
It would be churlish to begrudge Wohlforth his second career.
Theatrical, cruel, and implausible events
My old mate Ellis Sharp has sent me a copy of his new book, Dead Iraqis. Already reviewed enthusiastically in the Guardian by Nicholas Lezard, and with shout-outs by China Mieville, Lee Rourke, Iain Banks and me across the cover, this greatest hits compilation can't be expected to get a cool, objective review here, and it isn't going to get one. In the long-vanished fanzine New Dawn Fades, I described the stories in one of Sharp's earlier collections (from which four of the stories in this selection come) as 'free world samizdats [...] used to smuggle uncomfortable truths past the censors and border-guards of consciousness'. I've cited, quoted, alluded to, referenced, imitated, aped, mimicked and quite likely plagiarized some of them for decades.
All I can say is this. If you have a taste for experimental writing, and if the world has ever seemed to you to be in some measure a matter of 'Theatrical, cruel and implausible events organised upon the curving surface of a large globe hurtling through space, vulnerable to collisions, explosions, innumerable disasters both natural and man-made, a world squeezed beneath capitalism and state capitalism, crawling with hungry worms beneath every foundation stone and bed of roses and green well tended lawn' then this book is for you.
If you are easily offended, or are of a sensitive disposition, this book can be recommended as a small step towards ridding yourself of these afflictions.
Odious little vermin
"Dawkins deeply believes in the flourishing of the free human spirit which makes him a liberal humanist rather than a tragic humanist. He believes that if only those terrible guys out there would stop stifling and shackling us, then our creative capacities would flourish. I don't believe that. As a Marxist I reject that simple liberationism. I'm not again[st] humanism. I'm for a humanism which recognises the price of liberation. And that's what I call tragic humanism. The only idea of emancipation worth having is one that starts from looking at the worst, that starts from Swift's race of odious little vermin. If you're the kind of humanist who can understand what Socrates meant when he said it would been far better if man had never been born, you're on. A humanism like Dawkins's and possibly that held by Hitchens isn't worth all that much. It's too easy."This makes me want to spit.
I very much prefer the spirit of the humanist who wrote:
The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being.....
Son of Orange Walking with Dinosaurs
My brother James (mild-mannered professor by day, acerbic cartoonist by night) has been inspired by the third post below to send me this. 'Couldn't resist it,' he says. 'The joke wrote itself.'
The actual views of the Orange Order on evolution can be guessed at from these fascinating sidelights on Six Counties politics. And, in the name of parity of esteem, there's always the Catholic Church taking a stand for scepticism and against superstition, especially when it comes to worshiping trees.
Labels: creationism, evolution, local, Scottish politics, squibs
A stone age social revolution
So far, so familiar. We've all seen depictions of societies like that, in Conan movies if nothing else. However ...
'On a certain day 9200 years ago the manorial houses at the north side of the large square in Çayönü were burnt down, and this happened so fast that the owners were not able to save any of their treasures. The temple was torn down and burnt, and even the floor was ripped open, the stone pillars around the free space were taken down and the taller of them were broken up. The place itself - previously maintained and kept meticulously clean for more than 1000 years - was converted into a municipal waste dump. After a short chaotic transition all houses had been torn down. The slums in the west disappeared for good, but only a few steps away from the spot where the ruins of the manorial houses had burnt the new Çayönü was erected. The new houses were comparable in size to the old manors but there were no more houses or shacks built to an inferior standard. In all houses, work was done and all hints to social differences were erased.'
I can't help being thrilled at the thought of these stone age revolutionaries, burning the big houses of the masters and storming that terrifying temple, perhaps fearfully at first, then joyfully turning the gruesome house of the gods into a tip.
But we all know what happened next, don't we? The new society of equals was crushed by outside invasion, or a new caste or class of officials arose and things were soon worse than before ... something like that, yes?
Actually, no. The new type of society spread for thousands of miles and remained free, equal, happy and peaceful for three thousand years.
The site from which I've excerpted the above quotes (stripping out the numerous references to the archaeological literature) interprets this stone age classless and stateless society as communism. (Thanks to the latest issue of International Socialism for the pointer.) This may be controversial, but the archaeology is entirely mainstream, and there is no disagreement that the neolithic societies of ancient Anatolia, whose best-preserved site is Çatalhöyük, were very remarkable indeed.
Zimmer on Genomics
In cheerier news, scientists may have found the first steps to the life-extension pill.
Labels: genomics
Orange Walking with Dinosaurs
On Saturday I saw 'Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular' at the SEC. This event - pretty much sold out, remarkable considering the competing family attraction of an Orange Walk in the city centre - was expensive but worth it on a when-are-you-ever-going-to-see-something-like-this-again? basis, thoroughly enjoyable, scientifically sound and educational at a sort of visceral level: it takes life-size animatronics to convince the reptile lobes of my brain just how big dinosaurs could get. They could get very big. I now know that in my bones.
Thursday evening's 'Mutant Scum' event turned out all right on the night, with over fifty people in attendance and a high standard of story and delivery. The best, and certainly the one that came closest to the brief, was Stefan Pearson's vernacular take on the problems (and solutions) of genetic testing having become a component of the social security interview process: 'Gattaca for neds', as he put it.
Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday I and Pippa joined a dozen or so SF and fantasy writers in the Blackett Lab of Imperial College for 'Physics for Fiction', an ambitious outreach event organised by Dave Clements. It was fascinating to listen to actual research scientists talking about their work, and quite a relief to me to find that New Scientist and the pop sci books haven't been misleading me all these years. Yes, Virginia, there is dark matter. Simon Bradshaw took photos.
Quotes of the day, from my notes:
'We don't have an inflaton.'
'Cosmologists do not like coincidences.'
'"Splotch" is a technical term.'
'You can divorce topology from geometry.'
- Prof Andrew Jaffe.
'Telescopes are cheaper than starships.'
'Imagine making a planet out of cigarette smoke.'
- Dr Mark Thompson
'You measure your career in three missions.'
- Dr David Clements
Little Brother wins Prometheus award
Labels: libertarian, skiffy
The Human Genre Project
A while ago I was staring at a poster of the human genome produced by the US Dept of Energy, and I remembered Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction. Cue lightbulb moment.
Why not set up a website that displayed short pieces - stories, flash fictions, poems, and reflections - inspired by genes or genomics, and arranged them (as far as possible - I soon found myself applying for an artistic licence) according to the chromosome that carries the gene that inspired the piece?
Everyone I told about this idea thought it was a good one. The distinguished poet Laura-Gray Street contributed two published poems straight away. Best-selling fantasy writer Alma Alexander sent me an original short story. My good friend Mike Holmes volunteered witty song lyrics he'd once offered to Hawkwind. Other writers and poets assure me they have work on its way.
Now, thanks to enthusiastic work from Emma Capewell and Claire Alexander at the Genomics Forum, and the creative skills of web designer Damien Noonan, The Human Genre Project has gone live. It's early days yet, but it looks good and it's just waiting to be filled up with new writing. If you have something you think might sit well behind one of those colourful chromosomes, here's how to contribute.