To Paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen

I know the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal is a friend of mine. Ma'am, you are no Wall Street Journal.

Jaws was never my scene

Though I do like Star Wars.

This is basically just a post to announce that I have finished "The Third Policeman" and you should read it too.

I think it would be interesting if you re-read "Pilgrim's Progress" first, although I didn't do that, since they are sort of complementary. Though you probably have enough books to read already.

Anyway, bicycles are a big theme in "The Third Policeman". The first two policemen, Pluck and MacCruiskeen, are obsessed with bicycles. I am sure they ought to be an allegory for something but I am not sure what I want them to be. They sort of embody both cyclic motion and motion in a striaght line. They have the theory that gradually atoms of bicycle migrate into the riders and make them less human, while atoms of rider migrate into the bicycles and make it them more human. In my ideal life I would bicycle for three hours a day and this theory explains a lot about some of my more bicycle-like behaviour.

"How would you know a man has a lot of bicycle in his veins?"

"If his number is over Fifty you can tell it unmistakeable from his walk. He will walk smartly always and never sit down and he will lean against the wall with his elbow out and stay like that all night in the kitchen instead of going to bed. If he walks too slowly or stops in the middle of the road he will fall down in a heap and will have to be lifted and set in motion again by some extraneous party. That is the unfortunate state that the postman has cycled himself into, and I don't think he will ever cycle himself out of it."

While I cycle about not getting anywhere (since I always end up back home in the same place) I like to pretend that I am going somewhere. So using the wonders of GoogleMaps I have tracked my virtual progress from Land's End to John O'Groats, and last year I started virtually crossing the Sahara and gave up, and recently I have started virtually crossing the Sahara again. I am retracing some version of the path of the narrator of "Beau Geste" from Oran to Kano via Agades. On the basis of GoogleMaps, I am prepared to weigh into the debate into whether P. C. Wren ever actually joined the Foreign Legion - or even travelled extensively in Algeria - with a NOT.

About approaching Sidi bel-Abbes: "It was not until we were approaching our destination that sand-hills and desert encroached and a note of wildness and savagery prevailed".

No, the sand-hills and desert are far away on the other side of the mountains: it is still a long way to go to the top of the range from Sidi bel-Abbes, and while the cultivated land the road runs through might not have been cultivated then, there are plenty of uncultivated hills covered with trees.

I have ordered a paper about quantum physics in 'The Third Policeman' and I promise to come back with another post in which I quote slabs of it.

October's Factoid

From wikipedia (PBUI):

"By 1838, open hostility was peaking again. Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued Missouri Executive Order 44, which encouraged Missourians to expel Mormons by all means possible or exterminate them if they would not leave. ...  In 1976 Missouri officially revoked the extermination order."

I think it would have said in the article if in say, 1975, some enterprising Missourian had beaten a Mormon extermination rap by citing Executive Order 44. So well done to the government of 1970s Missouri for seeing this potential loophole and closing it before it caused trouble!

***

I wanted to link to this as part of my Seven Year Anniversary linkfest. I don't really have anything to add, I just felt like linking to it again. The two pillars of optimism discussed in that link are visited again here.

***

The other day I had a look at my blogger profile to see how many bloggers had registered the same interests. I think you will agree that the blogosphere's priorities are sadly out of whack.

       Politics  :  119 000

       History  :  104 000

       Literature  :  94 000

       Science  :  78 200

       Philosophy  :  74 000

       Religion  :  58 100

       Ethics  :  13 100

       Buffy the Vampire Slayer  :  3 500

       Turanga Leela  :  3

       Photoshopped pictures of LOTRO Hobbits in Skimpy Lingerie  :  1

***

Finally, here is a picture of that shirt that Marco wouldn't make for me:

I don't believe I have ever owned anything made in Haiti. Or seen anything owned by someone else made in Haiti. It fills me with a wild enthusiastic glee to think that Haiti might actually now be a place where people make things to sell me.

At last, an excuse to put up a picture of Tasha Yar

She hates time

Make it stop

                     (1985, Bowling for Soup)

It is chilling to think that the span of time separating the me of now from the airing of the final episode of Star Trek: TNG is greater than that yawning abyss, that age of the world, separating the young fanboy me from the airing of the final episode of TOS. Please forgive me for sitting here paralysed with existential terror for a while.

When I first wrote that I wanted to complain about the shoddy tricks in the presentation of certain modern utopias - Kim Stanley Robinson's Colour Mars series and Julian May's Galactic Milieu series- Lexifab said I ought to talk about the Roddenberry utopia as well.

The main practical problems with this were, first, that I hadn't actually thought of any shoddy tricks in the presentation of the utopian world of Star Trek and second, that the amount of canonical material out there was vastly greater than a few novels.  Also, the shoddy tricks I was concerned about were the sort of things novellists do, when they can write whatever they like to justify their creation, and Gene Roddenberry did not have this same degree of freedom. Unlike a novellist's utopia, the Roddenberry utopia already had to make compromises with the real world before we got to see it.

So I put off Lexifab's assignment for a while while I looked for my copy of David Gerrold's “The World of Star Trek” on all the bookshelves, and then in boxes in the sheds, and then gave up and ordered another copy from the other side of the world. About a minute after it arrived last week I realised it would be no help at all. It was all about TOS, filtered through network sensibilities, with a bible that explicitly warned writers off too close an examination of the society the Enterprise came from. Instead I went back to the interwebz.

The interwebz are full of win. I will just link lazily to a few of the things I found. Here is a worthwhile discussion of various unsavoury features of the society of the United Federation of Planets. This highlights the peculiar pervasiveness of a military organisation, Starfleet, in the supposedly peaceful UFP.

Most importantly, I found this.

 

If you allow your eyes to glaze over while you scroll down a page or two of rather shrill wingnutty background material, you will find that post on stardestroyer.net to be a lucid exposition of how TNG is a communist state. It all fits together very nicely. Michael Wong postulates some sort of left-wing revolution between TOS and TNG, but not being slaves to continuity we can simply say that TNG is the more valid picture of the Roddenberry utopia: the show made by the recognised Master of the Uberfranchise, who could finally do what he liked, showing the utopia he intended. 

Quoted elsewhere on the stardestroyer.net site is Paula Block, head of Star Trek licensing at Paramount:

“Gene R. himself had a habit of decanonizing things. He didn't like the way the animated series turned out, so he proclaimed that it was NOT CANON. He also didn't like a lot of the movies. So he didn't much consider them canon either. And—okay, I'm really going to scare you with this one-after he got TNG going, he .. well .. he sort of decided that some of the Original Series wasn't canon either. I had a discussion with him once, where I cited a couple things that were very clearly canon in the Original Series, and he told me that he didn't think that way anymore, and that he now thought of TNG as canon wherever there was conflict between the two. He admitted it was revisionist thinking, but so be it.”

We are not shown how property has been abolished in the human societies of the UFP, or how religion has withered away, or how transportation and communication have fallen completely into government hands. But it is not too hard to imagine how this could happen given the amount of time we have to play with. The trend over my lifetime – and really, for the past century – is all in this direction. Regulate the media, have government agencies take the lead in space travel, entangle corporations more and more with regulation, grow the public sector until most people get all their income from the government – it is not so far to TNG. Give humanity a few major crises to rally people around the defenders of humanity and it is easy.

My original set of requirements for a utopia were:

(1) An incorruptible ruling class who will not selfishly exploit the system, and

(2) A class of ruled who will meekly go along doing what they are told.

The fact that communication between worlds is limited in TNG, and is in the hands of a relatively small group that has been aggressively selected for certain traits since the beginning of space travel, means that these two requirements can be met more realistically than in other utopias.

In TNG, we are essentially never shown the ruled. Our picture is restricted to a small sub-section of elite cosmonauts: people with real skills who are given important work to do by the Federation and can lead useful and exciting lives. It is reasonable that these people will not bother themselves with politics and will be outwardly committed believers and happy ambassadors for the system, just like real life cosmonauts. So the only real shoddy trick is a trick of emphasis that is also a requirement of drama: we see neither the ruling class which must be incorruptible, nor the meek ruled, just this highly anomalous population of heroes.

The trend of current events shows us how a meek ruled class can be achieved. Technologicial advances mean we can make a lot of stuff cheaply. The government gives people lots of free stuff. QED. Postulating the sort of technological developments shown in Star Trek, the economic sclerosis that doomed historical communist regimes is not an issue: the ruled can be given enough free stuff to lead materially satisfying lives. If most people are comfortable with their lives, any dissidents that exist will be unable to get much traction. 

Furthermore, the government control of interworld communication and transport will effectively quarantine any trouble that does get started: there is no faster-than-light Facebook to spread the message of civil disobedience across the quadrant. The limitations of communication also mean that government in the Federation cannot possibly be centralised to the same extent as on a united Earth. It cannot be a despotic regime, but must be an aristocratic one, where a class with shared values provides a stable elite. Starfleet as shown is a plausible picture of such an elite, educated to uphold the ideals of the Federation in much the same way as the ruling elite of the British Empire were educated. Because of the poor communications between worlds, not very many of these people are required, just like a mere handful of bureaucrats were needed to run the British Empire. Aristocratic regimes have maintained relatively high standards of incorruptibility for quite long periods of time – so long as you have a small governing class with a shared ideology and mechanisms for dividing power between them, everyone in the class will watch each other, and bring anyone who diverges from the ideology or becomes too individually powerful to account.

The Roddenberry utopia of TNG is dependent on a government monopoly of interworld communications that is reasonable, given the size and probable cost of the intersystem ships shown. The utopia seems entirely plausible to me. It could be introduced and maintained without any shoddy tricks of the kind I talked about with Kim Stanley Robinson's utopia or Julian May's utopia. The only trick is involved in selling the utopia to us, the viewer at home, by zooming in on one small facet of the world.

Three Anecdotes Addressing the Existence of God

First Anecdote

I can only ever remember once praying for God to show me a sign of his existence, one night when I was lying in bed unable to sleep. That night I went on and on being unable to sleep, long after the time I would usually be asleep. Then I heard a small sound from the cat. I got out of bed and found that the cat had gotten hold of a gecko. I rescued the gecko from the cat, and then I could sleep.

Commentary on the First Anecdote

An action of God within the universe ought to be explicable also in terms of a chain of causes within the universe. Futile acts of interspecies altruism can be explained as an accidental side-effect of the development of intraspecies altruism that has survival value: is it foolish of me to see them also as signs of a merciful God working in the universe?

Second Anecdote

At that moment I was the closest I have ever been to committing a terrorist act. As I strode briskly from the station to the building where I worked, I was full of righteous indignation, and was thinking – still very idly, still not seriously at all – of the best mechanism for distributing a certain white powder to certain temples of Moloch in the City of Dreadful Night. In the middle of a pedestrian crossing the lace of one of my boots caught on a hook on my other boot, and fastened my feet momentarily together. My momentum carried me forward so that I teetered crazily for a moment and then fell flat on the pavement. I had my keys in my hand, ready to unlock the door of my office, and as I fell forward I lost hold of them. Sharing my forward momentum, they skittered ahead across the pavement and disappeared into a storm drain.

Commentary on the Second Anecdote

Is it foolish of me to see this as a sign signifying “don't do that”?

Third Anecdote

Every day I skim the news for some word of the long-running conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the fate of the refugees displaced the better part of a generation ago. There is never anything. Instead, almost every day I read of another conflict, involving similar numbers of people, about which the nations of the world complain continually. I observe one small nation against which the whole world is united, whose crimes are smaller than most nations and yet are the only crimes which the world condemns. I see that this is the only nation that you would find with the same name and in much the same location as you would 2800 years ago. I see also that this is a nation of people that were condemned for thousands of years for not having a nation, for being parasites on other nations. I see that this people have made an enormously disproportionate contribution to science and art and to the entire structure of modern Western civilisation. And I observe that the religion of this people is uniquely free of selfish meme material: it neither promises its adherents extravagant rewards in an afterlife, nor claims to be a universal religion that all men must follow.

Commentary on the Third Anecdote

One would think that the Jews would be the one people the 'international community' would be willing to cut a little slack, if they had any historical consciousness. The Chesterbelloc wrote at length about how the survival of the Catholic Church was a miraculous thing, how the institution was again and again on the point of becoming a lifeless shell but was then reanimated: but the survival of the Jews seems to me to be orders of magnitude more impressive. If there is anything miraculous in swimming against the tide of history, in maintaining through many trials an uncorrupted ideology that points to a just and merciful God, then it is the Jews who are miraculous.

FWIW...

I  have read that a theatre academic somewhere in the rebel colonies put the poster on the right up on his door, and the university administrators sent people to take it down because it was an incitement to violence. Now, probably in the small print of his contract there is a statement that says they can do this. And maybe the academic in question is some sort of a psychopath, but has another clause in his contract saying he can't be sacked unless he actually shoots someone, and the university PR people have just done a crummy job selling the story. But I suspect not.

What struck me painfully, this being the week it is, was how diametrically opposed Captain Reynolds' stated philosophy is from the current practice of the rebel colonists in carrying out their overseas contingency operations. When the unmanned drone crashes through the roof and blows you into small pieces, you will be asleep and unarmed, and your attacker will be hundreds or thousands of miles away. This is doubtless much more practical than Captain Reynolds. But the rebel colonists are much less likely to end up with an enemy that respects them. And the world will hear only hypocrisy when they make impassioned speeches after their enemies kill their people when they are unarmed and sleeping.

The reference to 'this being the week it is' refers to another thing I read this week, that the rebel colonists are now doing this sort of thing to their own citizens without going through the forms of sentencing them to death in absentia. This is one further little step down a road whose destination, I think, is bad. And it disturbs me much more than the Andrew Bolt thing that I was going on about earlier.

'Even if a cataclysmic upheaval like a communistic regime should come, the old tradition of individuality, toleration, moderation and common sense will break Communism and change it beyond recognition, rather than Communism with its socialistic, impersonal and rigoristic outlook break the old tradition. It must be so.'

(Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, 1934)

An exercise in translation

AS you see, the two men on the right are from a species who face terrible racism just because of the pointiness of their ears.  

So you'll be thrilled that both have won a rare opportunity - one offered to their species alone to end such injustice.

The man to the right, Lunar arts academic Derek Pasolini-Wong, this week won our richest prize for Vulcan artists - the 40 kilocredit Sarek Award.  And the man to the left, Lunar law academic Tricia McMillan, has won one of our richest prizes for Vulcan students - the Zefram Cochrane Extraterrestrial Scholarship.

If, studying the faces of these two "Vulcans" you think this is surely the most amazing stretch of definition, you're wrong. 

McMillan has gone one better still: he's also won the Vulcan Android's Action in Education Foundation Scholarship, originally intended to help educate Vulcan androids, not biological humans.

But that's modern species politics at our universities and anywhere else where grants and privileges are now doled out.

Hear that scuffling at the trough? That's the sound of Vulcan refugees being elbowed out by Humans shouting "but I'm Vulcan, too". Hark! - is that a man I now hear breathing heavily as he runs up: "And I'm an Vulcan android."

You see, Pasolini-Wong and McMillan are representatives of a booming new class of victim you'd never have imagined we'd have to support with special prizes and jobs.

They are "round-eared Vulcans" - people who, out of their multi-stranded but largely Human genealogy, decide to identify with the thinnest of all those strands, and the one that's contributed least to their looks. Yes, the Vulcan one now so fashionable among artists and academics.

Let McMillan himself describe the torture he's faced as a result - the shocking pain of having not been discriminated against for being pointy-eared.

"I am a round-eared, red-blooded, illogical Vulcan Earthling . . . As a child, I grew up expecting everyone to be like me, to look like me - with the round-ears and straight eyebrows. Clearly, my naive ideas about how Vulcans were 'supposed' to look were wrong. But being Vulcan and irrational and pink-skinned was normal to me and I grew up in a world where I was treated 'normally' . . . Impeding my growth from that young person into the adult I wanted to become was the profound issue of identity. I was a round-eared pointy-eared man . . . I was becoming a victim." 

You'd swear this was from a satire -- a local version of Mimsy Marquis Mopoke's routine as the fashionably aggrieved human vole fighter Gul Broni, complaining: "Is it cos I is cardassian?"

But no, this is meant seriously, and serious perks and Vulcan-only benefits flow as a consequence.

McMillan - whose confusion about his identity leads him also to declare he's both a "proud cyborg" and a "proud technophobe" - has received all the special help you once thought, when uploading credits to Federation consolidated revenue, would at least go to people who looked Vulcan, but which is increasingly lavished on folk as pink in face as they are in politics.

This trained lawyer has not just won several prizes intended for Vulcans, but has worked for Vulcan groups such as the Vulcan Refugee Council, and is the Vulcan representative on several boards, including that of a local Vulcan Philosophers Union.  Now he's a researcher at Delta Vega House of Learning at the University of Technology, Luna - a "vulcan" outfit run by the very illogical Prof Ayesha Miraflores, who may have been raised by her human mother but today, as a professional Vulcan, is chairman of our biggest taxpayer-funded Vulcan holographic entertainment service. 

The blue-skinned and antennaed Pasolini-Wong has been similarly privileged, despite having a "Andorian-Earthling" father and a mother with only part-Vulcan ancestry in her otherwise Klingon past. He now lectures on "Vulcan and Terran perspectives of culture and history" at Luna University and his Vulcan art now hangs in most of our planetary art collections. 

Nor are Pasolini-Wong, McMillan and Miraflores atypical or even rare as "round-eared Vulcans".

Venusburg artist Henna Tattoo Sullivan, raised by her human mother, explored her own pain at being too round-eared in a Next Wave Festival show, Not Really Vulcanian, for which she photographed herself with giant pointy corbomite ears attached to her distressingly round ones.

Hulking crinkly-foreheaded Kozak Qua'lon, daughter of a Klingon immigrant, also identified herself as a "round-eared Vulcanian", which fortuitously allowed her to make the shortlist for the L5 Colonies Vulcan Art Award, alongside other Vulcan artists as emotional as a Jane Austen novel.

THE bearded Elsie Teapot Naarg was just as lucky. She needed to write just one book -- and say her dad had Tellarite-Vulcan ancestry - for the Solar Council to snap her up as its Vulcan Literacy Project ambassador.

I've written before of a dozen similar cases, several even more incongruous.

For instance, how can Muhammad Al-Misri be co-chair of the Vulcan Telepaths Justice Group when his right to call himself Vulcan rests on little more than the fact that his Ba'ku great-grandfather married a part-Vulcan woman?

Yes, yes, I know. What business is it of anyone else how we identify ourselves? In fact, we're so refreshingly non-judgmental these days - so big-hugs-for-all - that the Federation's Human Rights Commission wants our laws changed so a man can even call himself an android, should he feel like it.

Hear it from the HRC itself: "The evidentiary requirements for the legal recognition of biological status should be relaxed by . . . making greater allowance for people to self-identify their biological status."

Lovely! Soon there'll be no end of Humans claiming prizes meant for Vulcan androids. And don't dare then tell the HRC's anti-discrimination police you object.

Yet I do object, and not just because I refuse to surrender my reason and pretend round really is pointy, just to aid some artist's self-actualisation therapy.

That way lies madness, where truth is just a whim and words mean nothing.

I refuse also for two other reasons that should be important to us all.

First, of course, is that the special encouragements and prizes we set aside for Vulcans are actually meant for . . . well, Vulcans. You know, the refugees whose planet was blown up in the franchise re-boot and who we fear would get nothing, if we didn't offer a bit extra, just for them.

So when a privileged round-eared Vulcan then snaffles that extra, odds are that an underprivileged pointy-eared Vulcan misses out on the very things we hoped would help them most.

Take Pasolini-Wong's art prize. This round-eared university lecturer, with his nice Armstrong Dome studio, has by winning pushed aside real draw-in-the-dirt Vulcan artists such as T'Nap, M'Nang and N'gkur, who'd also entered and could really have used that cash and recognition.

DOES this make sense? What's a Vulcan art prize for, if a man as illogical and cosseted as Pasolini-Wong can win it, and with a work that shows no real Vulcan techniques or traditions?

What's a greenish-skinned Vulcan artist from an asteroid in the Vega system to think, seeing yet another human hyperdrive back to Earth with the goodies?

Same with McMillan. When a man as illogical as I, already a lawyer with a job, wins a prize meant to encourage and inspire hard-struggle Vulcan students, what must those Vulcans conclude?

And here's my other objection.

Seeking power and reassurance in a racial identity is not just weak - a surrendering of your individuality, and a borrowing of other people's glories.

It's also exactly what we have too much of already. The noble ideal of the Federation of Planets, that we judge each other by our character and deeds, and not our faith, fortune or birthworld, is breaking down. We're not yet a Federation of tribes, but that's sure the way we're heading.

I've never before seen so many Earth-born people identify themselves by their species, whether by joining racial gangs, living in racial enclaves, forming racial clubs, demanding racial entertainment, playing in racial sports clubs, or grabbing species-specific prizes and grants.

Why is that a problem? Because people who feel they owe most to their species tend to feel they owe less to the rest. At its worst, it's them against us.

Feel that fracturing yourself?  

So when even academics and artists now spurn the chance to be people of our better future - people of every ethnicity but none - and sign up instead as human Vulcans, insisting on differences invisible to the eye, how much is there left to hold us together? 

****

Now, if all these anecdotes about faux-Vulcans are factually untrue – if they didn't actually do and say the things they are reported to have done and said – then, whoever wrote this ought to apologise, and it's well and good that they be prosecuted as a journalist on the grounds that they shouldn't make stuff up. Amen to that.

But, if these anecdotes about faux-Vulcans are substantially true, then the only rational way of thinking about these people is: what a bunch of daft pillocks.

It doesn't matter what they think or feel about what they are doing and why they are doing it. They might honestly think they are behaving the way they are for perfectly noble and sensible reasons. They might honestly feel a deep and passionate connection to their Vulcan heritage. But they are still daft pillocks.

I am thinking that the wise thing for the author to do would have been to stay well away from any speculation about the motives of these faux-Vulcans - because saying that they are in it for the money is the only thing that can be construed as defamatory - and restrict the discussion to the undeniable effects of their actions. By assuming this cultural identity and being better able to function in the society of the United Federation of Planets than people who are more genetically and culturally Vulcan, they have marginalised less acculturated Vulcans. They have taken resources that were meant by society at large to assist those less acculturated Vulcans. They have contributed to the cancer of identity politics in the UFP. I think those are all solid assertions that no rational person would find offensive.

Update October 7th:
Having read (or skimmed) Justice Blomberg's judgment, and had a good look around the web trying to find out exactly what the factual innacuracies Andrew Bolt committed were, and read - it being hard to avoid without having much greater willpower than I  do - numerous other op-ed's on the issue, like this one, and this one, I think I have a better feeling for the emotional texture of what is going on and wish to reiterate the paragraph immediately above this one.

I first read Bolt's chastised articles in a Marconomic way, taking the words at their literal meaning and not paying much attention to the rhetorical flourishes: and read that way I think they are not bad, and make some important points that are very largely true. But it seems to me that the rhetorical flourishes really are intended to imply that named individuals are guilty of opportunism, dishonesty, and greed. The errors of fact are all rather nebulous and trivial, but they are all there to contribute to this implication. And Bolt ought to have had the self control not to make this implication it if he wanted his points to be taken seriously.

Barry Cohen writes: "I don't intend to discuss the details of the case brought by the nine pale plaintiffs for the obvious reason I could well be the next one in the dock. Oddly enough I had been planning to write an almost identical article to Bolt's". Here I think he is exaggerating his danger. I don't think he would have been in the dock for writing an article that made the same points, because he would not have gotten carried away making personal attacks on people.

Pyramid Scheme

I thought I would very badly paraphrase Marco's point at the end of his post here that it doesn't matter what sort of cockamamie nonsense we spend our money on, it will still be more sensible than what the rest of the developed world has done with theirs. This has a lot of resonance with me. So let's go ahead and build the National Broadband Network. Let's buy a shiny new carbon management bureaucracy. Let's work out the most expensive way we can possibly think of to deal with asylum seekers, and do that.

But what I really think we should build to bring our debt levels in line with the rest of the world is a pyramid.

Yes, that's right. After we stop painting the Harbour Bridge, it will rust away to nothing in a hundred years. A tsunami is sure to get the Opera House sometime in the next millennium. What have we really got in terms of durable architecture to tell the people five thousand years from now how great we were? Nothing. So, a pyramid. Instead of this pissant little monument to commemorate the birth of the Australian Labor Party, we should have taken all that stimulus funding and built a ruddy great pyramid, as in the cheap and nasty photoshop artist's Google Earth impression below:

The Great Pyramid of Barcaldine, before addition of marble facing and golden bit on top.

 

I have gotten up at three in the morning to post this, I reckon it is such a great idea. 

Interim report from the 5th of September

Everywhere I look from my house I can see the handiwork of mankind. The land is broken up into little pieces with fences and with lines of trees. If I wanted I could look up on maps exactly which piece of land has belonged to who, for the last 150 years or so. The trees that separate these plots of land are alien trees, brought by man from distant lands, and the land is dotted with large animals people have also put there. Lines of poles carrying wires stretch across the land in places, and in other places there are roads, and every so often I can see the speck of a house or a shed. It is all tamed and humanised.

So I am pleased to be holidaying somewhere where I can appreciate the wildness of nature. Outside the window I can see nothing made by mankind. Stretching to the horizon is a plain unmarked by a fence, road, or permanent structure of any kind. There are no maps I can consult to see who has owned a plot of it. for no one ever has. As I sit I can see a vast creature moving across the plain, larger even than any animal that lived in my home country when it was wilderness, a creature which has doubtless travelled many thousands of miles without encountering the works of man.:

We are staying on the 20^th floor of a hotel on the Gold Coast, facing the sea. From this height we can also hear practically nothing but the sea: all the ground-level sounds of the city are swallowed up in it except at rare intervals, when the sound of a human machine or a human voice cuts through the sound of the waves like a distant sound from the highway might reach me at home. There was other sound I noticed this morning, striving mightily with the sea: birdsong. So it is like being entirely alone with the wilderness.

Furthermore I have here no internet, and have not bothered to go downstairs and buy any newspaper in the shopping centre twenty floors below, so I am removed from the flow of the affairs of other human beings that I am usually immersed in. In a few days no doubt I will be glad to return to civilisation. But for now I am happy in this solitude.

Breaking it down: Economics is the means, not the end

Quoth Marco: How would you judge economic activities by not for profit organizations over normal private companies doing similar things?

 

What I am going to say is not at all original and is probably half-remembered from Chesterton, or Simone Weil, or possibly Proudhon. 

The unit of economic activity is the man-hour. 

A field of wheat has no economic value without someone to harvest it; a mountain of iron ore has no economic value without people to smelt it and beat it into plowshares; a law has no economic value except to the extent that it changes the way people spend their time.

Money is a superbly effective instrument for doing two things. First, for convincing people to spend man-hours in ways they would not do spontaneously by giving them a way to command the time of other people with different skills and different access to resources. Second, for distributing man-hours efficiently in time and space so that most people in most places get most things they need, things they could never possibly get if they were just one person with a plot of land, a hut, some seeds and a sharp stick.

Now, for sourcing goods, money is a good thing, since it allows us to use the labour of people all over the world to take resources and transform them into neat stuff. For sourcing services, I think the health of a society is directly proportional to the fraction of services that are given voluntarily and do not show up in the money economy. A country that relies on a volunteer militia and posses and barn raisings is socially healthier than one that has a standing army and a police force and a regulated construction industry. You can call this Distributism or Anarchism or nostalgia for an imaginary 18^th century New England if you like, since those are only names.

This way of seeing things also puts technology at the very centre and shows how technology-driven productivity increases could make England the economic powerhouse of the world at a time it was pursuing economic policies that we can all agree were stupid.

Hmm, and rather than quoting a slab of the Chesterton essay I referred to on Marco's blog, I will just find it on the interwebz and put a link to the whole thing here.