Posts Tagged ‘writing’
Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution – a bit weird
my mother’s copy
I just finished reading Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, and I don’t quite know why, or whether I ever really read it. It was a tedious activity because I mostly had only the vaguest idea of what she was on about, and at times it seemed deliberately obscure. The quotes from classical Greek and Roman, only sometimes translated – didn’t help, nor did the extreme maleness of the language and references – Olympe de Gouges’ headless corpse would be spinning in its grave, if she was ever given one. The book is flooded with male pronouns and references to male predecessors of, commentators on or participants in the two principal revolutions she discusses – the American and the French. Let’s see – Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hume, Adams, Jefferson, Saint-Juste, Robespierre, Paine, Tocqueville and Marx to name a few (I was excited to find her dropping the name Odysse Barrot at one point. The first woman?!! But no, no, looking her up she turned out to be a male). She did finally, toward the end of the last chapter, give an honourable mention to Rosa Luxemburg – too little too late for me.
The book has been criticised – rightly – for its elitism, which occasionally shone through the murk of its exasperating pedantry. Here’s an example, if I’m able to read her aright:
The most the citizen can hope for [in a two-party system] is to be ‘represented’, whereby it is obvious that the only thing which can be represented and delegated is interest, or the welfare of the constituents, but neither their actions nor their opinions. In this system the opinions are indeed unascertainable for the simple reason that they are non-existent. Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods – moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former – but no opinion.
On revolution, pp 268-9
The claim that opinions don’t exist outside of public debate is about as preposterous as you can get, and rarely does Arendt write plainly enough for me to detect the absurdity. She seems to be saying that individuals just don’t have the wherewithal to form opinions. And here was me – a bit of an isolated type – thinking I’d been spending much of my time doing just that! Which doesn’t make me particularly clever – even five-year-olds can do it.
So what is the take-away from Arendt’s book? She writes much about the success of the American revolution and the failure of the French, but I’d always thought of the US experience being first a war of independence, and then an attempt to work out a new governmental system which would unite and perhaps incorporate the various systems that the British and European settlers had devised in the century or more before that war. A federal system indeed. The problem with the French revolution, as Arendt certainly realised, but never really spells out in her book, was that there was no agreed-upon replacement plan for its monarchy and its ancien regime. The disagreements, and the power vacuum created by the monarchy’s sudden destruction, led to internecine strife at a level never seen before in Europe, with some believing that everything had to change, including the calendar (which was much easier to deal with than the impoverishment of the people – the true cause of the revolution in the first place). In the following few years, moderates like de Gouges, who proposed a constitutional monarchy, were done away with, leading to the Terror and the execution of Robespierre, and eventually the Napoleonic despotism.
So the French Revolution was a murky, muddled and devastating affair, one that certainly ‘ate its own children’, and I’m not sure that comparing it to the situation a few years earlier in what was to become the USA, where the politically seasoned and not-so-impoverished settlers managed to fight off a common enemy while adopting variants of that enemy’s constitution, is all that helpful.
But that wasn’t so much what irritated me about the book. What most annoyed me was its opacity, and its maleness. It was as if she was trying to be more male than male, in her ‘scholarliness’, her dryness, her emotional distance. It was really quite weird.
Reference
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution 1963
Darwin and me – one more time
As some of my posts might indicate, I’ve become a bit of a Darwin obsessive over the years, and I think I’m often more interested in personalities than ideas. I’ve even become quite protective of him, even though I have every reason to be pissed off by the privileges he benefitted from. Darwin was brought up amongst the ‘whig aristocracy’, his father being a wealthy doctor and a smart investor, closely associated with his wife’s Wedgwood wealth, and I really mean wealth. Basically, he inherited smarts as well as wealth. I only inherited smarts, but comparisons are odorous, I’m told.
So Darwin was born with ‘connections’, and lived in a large Shrewsbury estate with servants and plenty of land for hunting and collecting and an inheritance that included grandad Erasmus with his many intellectual and sensual pursuits. Some 150 or so years later, I lived in a rental purchase home in Elizabeth, a working class region north of Adelaide, South Australia, where I started my first job at 15 or 16 in a washing-machine factory. I’d recently left school after having been slapped very forcefully in the face by the headmaster for chewing gum while he was talking to me. I’ve had fantasies ever since of slicing his penis off, ripping his intestines out and observing his reaction. Sorry about that – but Edward II, the so-called ‘hammer of the Scots’, got away with doing that kinda thing to William Wallace… that’s the upper classes for you.
As a young man, Darwin was sent to Edinburgh to finish his education. He mostly studied medicine and the natural sciences, but he couldn’t cope with dissection, not to mention the Scots’ murder of the language, and after some family discussion he transferred to Cambridge. In both institutions, his family name and fame provided him with a number of intellectual connections, and that’s how he got the Beagle assignment. This was definitely the making of him as a naturalist, though his role was supposed to be that of a gentleman’s gentleman to Captain Fitzroy, who, as a Tory toff, didn’t much like the idea of being cooped up for some years in an almost embarrassingly tiny boat with a lot of unlettered sea urchins. The voyage lasted nearly five years and ultimately circumnavigated the globe. Darwin was 22 years old when it set out.
In my five years from the age of 22 I spent much of my time on the dole, having previously worked in two washing-machine factories, a factory that made mobile classrooms for over-crowded schools, a factory making metal pipes for various purposes, a foundry making metal baskets also for various purposes, and a stint as a nurse’s aid in an institute quaintly named The Home for Incurables.
So, after all that, at 22 I moved into a share-house with an art student of the same age, and a much older social worker (at 28!) who was openly homosexual and never wore clothes in the house. It was a very happy period for me, I began to write a regular diary and found myself on the fringes of an arty-farty crowd. My main literary influences then were, I’d say, two very different self-obsessives, Michel de Montaigne and Franz Kafka, and I began to take a little pride in my intellect.
In my 24th year I enrolled in a College of Advanced Education (CAE), an education facility created in the 70s and 80s, above high school but not quite a university, doing a thing called Communication Studies. A couple of essays I wrote caused enough interest that the head of the college invited me into his office and suggested that, with his help, I could be transferred to Flinders University, perhaps to study philosophy. On further questioning, though, he found that I was failing in at least one subject, mathematics, which I was more or less completely ignoring, and he changed his mind. I dropped out of the college at the end of my first year.
Over the next few years I moved from share-house to share-house and lived with a number of interesting characters. It was a carefree, easy-going time of reading, writing, and chit-chat. I lucked into a job as a kitchen-hand in a swank French restaurant and became quite interested in cooking, which raised my status among share-house comrades.
And then Darwin arrived back in England. He’d gained much self-confidence and something of a reputation, having sent off some intriguing fossil specimens from his labours in South America, and soon made contact with Charles Lyell, whose first volume of Principles of Geology he’d read on his travels, as well as his erstwhile associates Henslow, Sedgwick and Fox. He published his ‘Journal of researches’ in 1839, and subsequent geological and biological works earned him membership of the Geological Society and the Royal Society, and acquaintance with such worthies as William Whewell, Richard Owen and John Gould, and later with up-and-comers Joseph Hooker and Thomas Huxley, among many others. Also in 1839, at the age of 29, he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood.
At the age of 29 I started studies at Adelaide University, where I remained for nine years, shifting from subject to subject – a little philosophy, a very little biology, a major in French, and some months of teacher training, until finally, forced for financial reasons to get a factory job once more, at Rupert Murdoch-owned Griffin Press (now defunct), chucking unbound books onto a conveyor belt during the afternoon and attending university classes, very bleary-eyed, in the mornings. I earned enough to go full-time again and obtain a fairly useless but quite easy Honours degree in English, thus ending my university career, aged 38, as unemployable as before.
Into his thirties, married and with children in quick succession, Darwin became more and more interested, even obsessed, with the dangerous concept of the transmutation of species. Lamarck had been one of the first to broach the idea, with the publication of Philosophie zoologique in 1809, which was much ridiculed in British intellectual circles in the 1830s and 40s, including by Darwin himself, albeit with a difference. Lamarck may have missed the causal principles of transmutation (as did Darwin, since genes were unknown in his day), but the extent to which he ‘got it right’ is still debated. But Darwin was certainly on the trail of an evolutionary theory, as many of his notes show. The appearance, in 1844 of the controversial bestseller, Vestiges of the natural history of creation, published anonymously by Robert Chambers (another very clever Scot), which Darwin and many of his natural philosophy friends devoured, taught him above all else how fractious the topic of species and their origins could be, and he was constitutionally averse to controversy. Having moved with Emma and his growing brood to a rambling country estate in Kent, courtesy of his wealthy family, he made a decision, of sorts, to narrow his biological focus to one particular class of Crustacean, barnacles – though he didn’t give up on his other species explorations and their human connections.
So, having finished with university, and being somewhat buoyed by the odd academic compliment on my writing abilities (though I received a bare pass and a screed of sarcastic comments from a philosophy lecturer for an overdue essay I wrote, methinks under the affluence of inkahol), I had the bright idea of writing to the editor of a local news-and culture rag, The Adelaide Review, offering my services as a journalist-writer of sorts. I made the letter très jazzy and up-beat, suggesting a number of possible topics, including something about my mis-spent youth in working-class Elizabeth. To my great surprise the editor called me more or less instanter, quoted with amusement some witty line I’d written, and asked me to send a piece on Elizabeth. It was published in the next issue, and I found myself a published writer, in miniature. I was rather nonplussed at how easy it had been. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Could I make my living as a writer somehow? The Adelaide Review piece was a one-off, I quickly realised, but maybe I could expand it into a memoir-novel of hijinks and wit, or what might pass for it. I had recently moved into a share-house with an older, twice-married woman (I’d been desperate to move out of a house I shared with another older woman whose interest in me I was unable to reciprocate), and we began a romantic liaison – again my cooking skills appeared to be key. I think, though, that I’d already written most of my Elizabeth novel by the time we became a couple. I suppose I should check my journals, which I never read.
So we were now in the mid 1990s, and, perhaps through the auspices of The Adelaide Review, my expanded writings about my Elizabethan childhood were sent to and accepted by Wakefield Press, and I was given a State grant to help me along. I bought my first computer and began to navigate that Great New Thing, the internet. The novel was completed in 1996, my fortieth year, but it was put through an exhaustive editing process, which I like to think, for vanity’s sake, was standard practice. It was published in late 1997, and for a brief period my life became public. I was written up in the The Advertiser’s Weekend Magazine, together with a full-page pic of my handsome dial, and I was interviewed on local TV and radio. Over the next week or two I received two dismissive reviews, one in Adelaide University’s weekly rag, On Dit, which was a real piss-off (private school kid, no doubt), and one tiny positive one, from somewhere. And so began and ended my public career as a writer.
So that’s it about me. Darwin ended his love-hate affair with barnacles in about 1849, his fortieth year, but his explorations and speculations re speciation continued apace. He’d also managed to father a large family. I’m not sure how this was done, having no experience in the matter. He suffered the death of his favourite child, Annie, from scarlet fever, and he suffered his own aches and pains – biliousness, flatulence – for which he tried the water cures that had become super-popular in mid-nineteenth century England, especially among the upper classes. They seemed to work for him, and his embarrassments aren’t so much mentioned into the 1850s (all this from Janet Browne’s bio). He grew and crossed various plant species, raised pigeons, and kept up a rich correspondence with breeders and fanciers throughout Britain, and overseas. He became particularly interested in how seeds could be dispersed over long distances, in sea-water, or in the feathers of birds, or even via the poop of any number of species. He worried, though, that he was unable to see the forest for the trees. He was building up a great load of possibly related information, for a thesis he clearly trembled over, but was driven by….
References
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, 1995
Stewart Henderson, In Elizabeth, 1997
a bonobo world? an outlier, but also a possibility: 1
bonobo togetherness – who are the girls and who are the boys?
I’ve decided to focus on this very broad topic, and to write a book. Here’s my first (and in parts my second) draught
Introduction – a slow-burning inspiration.
In these few introductory pages, I’ll be writing a little about myself, after which I’ll (try to) leave me behind. At least as a topic. Of course, I’m on every page, as is Max Tegmark in Our Mathematical Universe, or David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity, or Johann Noah Harari in Homo Deus, or any writer of any other book of ideas, but in this opening I want to admit the lifelong passion I have for the set of ideas, or really feelings, I wish to explore here. They’re vital feelings, and big ideas, though they may come out as inchoate, or incoherent, in the telling. I probably feel most passionate about them because they seem so knocked about and pushed aside by the world I find myself in – though that world is always in flux and there are moments of inspiration.
It was in the mid 1980s that I first heard about bonobos on an episode of The Science Show, still running on Australia’s ABC Radio National. I would have been in my late twenties, just beginning an arts degree as a ‘mature-age student’ at Adelaide University. I was living in a chaotic share-house amongst students, student-types, misfits like myself. It had been my life for several years. Due to difficult family circumstances I’d left school at fifteen, and I’d fantasised for a while about being a complete auto-didact, the smartest fellow without a tertiary degree on the planet, or at least on the street, but I was frankly embarrassed at my poverty and my string of unpleasant and failed jobs in factories, offices, restaurants, and briefly, a hospital. My great solace, my way of maintaining pride in myself, was writing. In those pre-computer days I filled up foolscap journals with crabbed writing in blue ink. I wrote about the books I read, the people I met, imitations of favourite writers, and, too often, reflections on the women I came into contact with – admirable, mysterious and ever-unattainable. I still have those journals, mouldering in old boxes, covering 13 years or so before I could buy my first computer.
I was ever a hopeless case when it came to the opposite sex. It wasn’t quite that they all despised or were indifferent to me. I sometimes made female friends but they were never the ones I was attracted to. In fact I rarely made friends, and my obsession with writing didn’t help. As one of my housemates once bluntly told me ‘you’re always living alone no matter how many people you’re sharing with.’
So I wrote about my failures with women and congratulated myself on my literary abilities. I was of course my own worst enemy in these matters. Whenever a woman I was interested in showed signs of repaying that interest, I ran the other way, figuratively and sometimes even literally. There were all sorts of excuses, even some good ones. I was perennially penniless, I had a chronic airways condition – bronchiectasis – that meant my voice would get caught in the ‘wet webs’ as I called them, which made me naturally anxious about my breath, and there were other problems I’d rather not go into. In fact I was intensely shy and self-conscious, but good at putting on an air of intellectual disinterest. This had generally disastrous consequences, as when I encountered a female ex-housemate and told her that now our share-house was all-male. ‘Oh yes, that would suit you perfectly,’ she said with some disdain. I was mortified.
In fact I was obsessed to what I considered an unhealthy degree with women and sex. My fantasies went back to pre-adolescence, when I imagined doing it, whatever it might be, with every attractive girl, and boy, within my purview. Now I assume this was relatively normal, but I’m still not sure. But my thoughts on sexuality and gender went further. I recall – and all memories are unreliable, as they share most of the same neural processes as our imaginations – standing during assembly with my classmates, looking up and down the class line, assessing their attractiveness and overall likeability. It occurred to me that the most ‘interesting’ boys were girlish and the most interesting girls were boyish. I remember being struck by the thought and how smart I was to think it. I returned to this thought again and again.
Before I ever had a girlfriend (and yes I did have one or two) I imagined an ideal, embodied by one of the pretty ones around me, with another brain inserted, more or less like my own. Someone funny, thought-provoking, inspiring, freewheeling, exhaustingly fascinating – and yes, I really did think of myself that way. And yet – I did worry that I might not be able to hold onto such a scintillating prize. And that set me thinking – such an extraordinary girl couldn’t be mine, or anyone’s. She would own herself. To maintain her interest in me, I’d have to be constantly proving myself worthy, which might be a thrilling challenge, and a great motivator. But what if I had to share her? My adolescent answer was – so be it. The key, if I found her so valuable, so inspiring, would be not to lose her. Not to be cut off from her. To prove myself so valuable that she wouldn’t want to lose me either, while seeking out others.
I won’t pretend that they were so clear-cut, but these were certainly the sorts of ideas swirling around in my head when I thought about love, desire and relationships as a youngster, and they hadn’t changed much – perhaps due to little actual experience – when I listened to the scientist extolling the lifestyle and virtues of our bonobo cousins many years later. I still remember the warm tones of his signing off – ‘Long live bonobos – I want to be one!’
So the following is an exploration of a world that seems worthy of study both for itself and for ourselves. We’re now the overwelmingly dominant species on the planet, and this is having strange contrasting effects, of hubris and despair. It’s also the case that we’re not one thing – our species is composed of cultures that seem to have little connection with each other, and multiculturalism is seen as having enriching as well as disastrous consequences. In such complex and dynamic circumstances, what do bonobos really have to teach us? The following is an attempt to answer that question in the most positive light.
mitochondrial DNA, ancient civilisations and early writing
linear A
It seems to me we’re living in a world of knowledge revolutions, such as a consciousness revolution, a DNA revolution, a cosmological revolution, a stem-cell revolution, in fact every area of science or technology you care to look at seems to be undergoing revolutionary change, with far more happening than you can ever get your head around, especially if you’re as slow, eternally baffled and wide-eyed as I am. Anyway, I find mucking around in the shallows a lot of fun.
The use of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA to trace the provenance of ancient civilizations is one heady development worth keeping tabs on. One such civilization is the Minoan, which flourished 4000 years ago on the island of Crete. More precisely, it’s believed to have lasted for 12 centuries before coming to a sudden end at around 1500 BCE, probably as a result of a volcanic eruption followed by a tsunami. Arthur Evans, the famed excavator of its palatial remains, named the civilization Minoan after the mythical Minos, king of Crete. He believed it to have been a product of refugees or travellers from Egypt, a view which has divided scholars since. A recent mitochondrial DNA analysis, however, has tended to support the view that the Minoan civilisation was indigenous and independently arrived at. However, mitochondrial DNA, which traces back strictly through the female line, has its limitations, and there are plans for further research using nuclear DNA. It’s unlikely that we’ll completely unravel the web of relations that led to the surge in complexity known as the Cretan bronze age in about 2700 BCE, but DNA analysis is certainly helping to clarify the picture.
When I read about ancient civilizations I’m always interested in how they fit into a wider picture. The Minoans seem to have possessed an open, largely peaceful trading culture, so the links would no doubt have been numerous. There’s plenty of evidence of cultural exchange with Egypt over the period. One of the interesting features of early Minoan civilization is its writing system and how it connects with others, particularly Egyptian writing. The earliest writing forms found on Crete, Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A, are as yet undeciphered. They appear to be related, but have so far have not been traced to any other known language. Linear B, a later Mycenaean-influenced form, was deciphered in the fifties, and this created an expectation that Linear A, which showed superficial similarities to Linear B (both are described as linear because they are more line-based than Cretan hieroglyphs), would soon be cracked, but the logograms or graphemes of Linear A are largely unique. Cretan hieroglyphs bear some relation to Egyptian hieroglyphs but also to various early Mesopotamian writings, so it’s not certain whether it was independently developed. This form of writing, which goes back at least to 3000 BCE, seems to have disappeared by 1700 BCE.
So we seem to have had a relatively sudden evolution of writing around the Mediterranean and the Mesopotamian regions in the late fourth millenium BCE, though various proto-writing forms had existed for millenia beforehand. The big question here is whether the spark that created a more complex and useful type of writing occurred in only one place and was carried to other places by travellers and traders, or was it a matter of similar conditions fostering a set of sparks in the region, kind of coincidentally but not really. Maybe that’s something to explore further but I’m done for now.