“Individual incident, A rippling pinprick Sticks though the surface. Confabulated stories of past achievements. Darwin laughs in his grave. “Oh, how far we’ve come.” Humanity’s flower buds, Headed for the combine. But in presence of metaphysical drought The rootdragon gasps for breath, Spreads its wings And flies, Unwilling to be harvested. Existential alchemy. Third eye blinded with CO2 casing. The “I” becomes “We”. Personal paradoxes unfold. Individually exist for the herd.”
Today I’m discussing a prescient novel which analyses the subtleties of social order and stability, and the place we each accept within it. John Steinbeck’s The Pearl is a brilliantly insightful work about a pearl diver named Kino, who lived in a poor area of Mexico in 1940. He acquires the most valuable pearl he, or anyone he has ever known, has ever seen. The acquisition of this pearl, rather…
The idea of eternal recurrence, as read in Nietzsche, has fascinated me for a long while. The first time I came in contact with the idea was in fact in reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where the author writes
“If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross… In the world of eternal return the weight of…
In our everyday life, we are brought into a world of ‘otherness’ through the induction of language other than that of our own. In particular, here, I mean the language of the product; food and drink, clothes, anything which can be marketed. Our own life contains its self within a field of language, I.E. that language which is natural for us to use and think through and with. Each field of…
This is an odd entry in the works of le Carre, chronicling the later life of George Smiley. Following the events of Call for the Dead Smiley, no longer with the service, is living a quiet life in London. He is contacted by an old colleague about the a letter she has received from the wife of one of the masters at a venerable Public School (that is, a very old, expensive and exclusive private school) in Dorset, in which she states the fear that her husband is intending to kill her. Smiley calls another master there, the brother of one of his late friends, to find that this woman has indeed been murdered, so travels down to hand the letter over to local detectives and becomes embroiled in the investigation.
So, this is George Smiley as a free agent, outside the Circus. It seems that le Carre may have been toying with setting his character up as a detective - more Father Brown than Sherlock Holmes, although there is something Holmesian in the way the plot unfolds, with Smiley’s vast, if ponderous, intellect processing all the details and building a picture nobody else can see. There is also something of Agatha Christie about the layers of upper-class English manners and class distinctions, in this book those stratifications are precisely the point rather than being, as with Christie, simply the medium on which the puzzle of the plot is hung.
It is clear from early on that this is a blistering attack on the British class system and the snobbish, restrictive forms, rules and structures that protect those at the top - something the author confirms in both the original afterword and a new one, added to this edition in 2010.
In this, le Carre also acknowledges the book’s shortcomings as a thriller (although, by modern terms, I would not class it as a thriller at all, but a mystery) and this is indeed true, perhaps largely as it comes between his excellent debut and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which may be the finest spy thriller ever written. The novel is very old-fashioned, some of the supporting cast are fairly flat sketches, and some of the attitudes - especially those toward women - are very much of their time (although that balanced against some very progressive notions) but he already shows his eye for detail and ability to infuse a scene with colour and meaning (even if most of colours are the shades of grey of post-war Britain) and, despite the flaws, this gripped me enough to read in three sittings.
Now, I am very much looking forward re-reading The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.
People aren’t pointed toward individual steps that they can take, or local problems that they can work on, or toward programs that will help them better understand the state of the science.
ok but those, like, don’t exist?
climate change is, technologically and scientifically speaking, almost a solved problem. cars bad, bikes good; coal bad, uranium good; beef bad; beans good; coke steel bad, hydrogen steel good; portland cement – this is the tricky one. but, like, other than that it’s almost entirely a political problem. the nuclear reactor was invented in the 40s. the bike predates the internal combustion engine. prioritising the latter over the former and suppressing nuclear power are policy choices. we know how to make clean electricity, we just choose not to. you can do things locally to push policy in a more climate-friendly direction.
in contrast we have no fucking idea how to build an AI that doesn’t go Skynet, and that’s why FOOMers are so scared. it’s, in their view, a real risk that we have approximately zero idea how to mitigate. and hacking away at your arduino or making your city council switch to firefox does nothing to change that. (it may be good for other reasons!) the situation is much more like asteroid impacts or, idk, the threat of a really bad pandemic (think ebola, not covid), than climate change.
just because it’s despair-inducing doesn’t mean it isn’t true! it really is possible we are fucked! sometimes the appropriate level of scared to be is “very”!
what level of govtbrain is it when u see “we need to dramatically lower the standard of living of everyone in the world because some Science guys made some graphs” and go “it’s solved, it’s just a political problem”
(”it” being “building a political system capable of dramatically lowering the standard of living of everyone in the world, by force”)
hmmm so my main addition to this post is that bikes and cars aren’t good for the same things at all. I used a bike as my main form of transportation for, idk, a few years, and even laying aside infrastructure stuff (I live in a reasonably bike-friendly area), you can do things with a car that you just can’t do with a bike, and for which public transit is also a poor substitute. I really wonder if the “just bike more” people have actually ever been carless and relied on biking for an extended period of time
do you live in the united states?
Yeah (in a town regionally known for being bike-friendly)
This is like growing up in a landfill regionally known for being clean.
you seem to do this thing on a lot of posts abt cars/public transit and related issues where someone will say “that won’t work well in the US for reasons xyz” and then you say “well that doesn’t count because it’s America” and this doesn’t address the actual issue at all
I’m saying the US doesn’t have bike-friendly towns, so you can’t infer what they are like from the US. Much like you can’t infer what giraffes are like from US fauna.
“This won’t work well in the US because …” isn’t a serious argument. Geometry doesn’t work any different on your continent. The difference between these
is not an immutable fact of the universe like, say, the laws of thermodynamics. It is a contingent product of human choices. Because you have made so many idiotic, misguided, and downright immoral choices over decades, you’re going to have to make a ton of effort to undo all that damage.
Like, the scale of the challenge here isn’t putting up a few bus stops and an unshielded bus lane on the left and pretending that’s the solution. It’s getting to the right.
The first step when you’re in a hole is to stop digging. The second is to realise that while the first rung of a ladder is vastly insufficient to get out of the hole, it is still necessary – and so are all the rest. This remains true no matter how deep you’ve dug the hole.
In the US you just built those lying on their sides, since you never developed the technology known as “the third storey”
the american ideal is a society where no one has to be a landless peasant. the morgenthau plan deserver ideal is a society where no one gets to be anything but
Worth noting that even if this is your goal, having businesses and communal areas mixed in among the houses instead of elsewhere, a drive away, would take up the exact same amount of space. There’s a lot of things you’d need to change about modern America if you want all or most people to be able to avoid the fate of landless peasanthood, but building more single-use suburb-prisons is not one of them!
A weird thing in English is that “savory” means (and has always meant) the exact same thing as “umami”, but everyone has agreed to switch to the word that comes with this bizarre backing mythology of a secret fifth flavor recovered from the depths of the Orient
I wish I had an OED subscription so I could investigate this more carefully, but I absolutely don’t believe that “savory” has always meant umami. It’s true that that if you look at a dictionary like Merriam-Webster todayyoucan find
c : pleasing to the sense of taste or smell especially by reason of effective seasoning d : having a spicy or salty quality without sweetness e : being, inducing, or marked by the rich or meaty taste sensation of umami
but this was added recently! Back in 2015 it only had the senses c&d. My guess for how this happened is that this is a back-formation from the Japanese; someone was looking for a less foreign-sounding way to refer to umami, and calqued it as “savory”. (This is a pretty good rendering, because the Japanese word umami うま味 is itself a kind of pun. With a slightly different spelling うまみ it means “tastiness”—i.e. “savory” in sense c.)
I think historically the core meaning has just been c, it was a different word for “tasty”. If you look in Webster 1913, that’s how they define it. (I’m even slightly suspicious of sense d! It certainly occurs in set phrases like “would you like a sweet or savory dish”, but did people really have a coherent concept of non-sweet tastes? But that’s a digression.)
If you search for “savory” in 19th century books on on Google Books, there are a few examples which could plausibly refer to an umami taste, e.g. “a savory stew”, but those are in the minority, equally many hits are for things like “savory herbs”, “a savory fruit”, “savory smell”, which obviously aren’t umami, they are simply things that taste good. And perhaps more importantly, even in the case of meat dishes, the word only seems to be used to mean it tastes good. Obviously I have not done a thorough inventory, but I challenge you to find any historical usages of “savory” as a specific taste, analogous to “sweet” or “salty”.
I’m pretty confident that you will not find any such examples, because the idea of a fifth basic taste did not get generally accepted until the 1980s. E.g. as late as 1999, Alan Davidson writes inThe Oxford Companion to Food:
the view that has been most widely accepted, at least in western countries, is that there are four tastes: sweet, bitter, acid (or sour), salt. However, many people believe that one or some of the following should be added to the list: metallic; ‘meaty’ or (to use the Japanese term) umami; astringent; pungent (as in the Chinese list above).
Note that even at this point there apparently was no consensus to translate it as “savory”, since he instead writes “meaty”.
I think this is the basic reason people use the loanword: the idea that umami is a taste is a fairly recent scientific discovery and conceptual reorganization, while the word “savory” has been around since Middle English, so if you want a word referring specifically to things that trigger the glutamate/inosinate/guanylate receptor, “savory” would be unworkably ambiguous.
Also,apparently the notion that umami qualifies as a basic taste got accepted thanks to a specific research program by group of Japanese scientists who launched a subfield of umami studies in 1982. It seems pretty dismissive to write it off as orientalism when it was due to the deliberate work of actual people living in the orient!
Fellas is it appropriation to adopt the intellectual achievements of another culture and recognize them as such?
Anyway, anecdotally: growing up, before ever hearing the term umami, I had always conceptualized savory as simply a general term for “not sweet”. Indeed, I’m pretty sure I asked my parents what it meant at one point, and this is exactly what they told me. The idea that it corresponded specifically to the taste of (what I now know to be) glutamates was absolutely never part of my idiolect.
I guess one of the things about my politics is that I’m a principled pluralist in basically every regard, and as far as I can tell this isn’t something that’s in vogue anywhere on the political spectrum right now. I run up against nationalists by believing in the value of diversity-for-diversity’s-sake; I run up against “wokeness” for believing this extends not just to a narrow and rigid selection of identity categories, but to all aspects of the human condition, including ones that might be considered rather ugly; I run up against technocrats of all sorts (leftist, liberal, rightist) for actively opposing the desire to build a socially optimized society, in favor of one that accommodates a wide range of people and things and communities. I just like the world, I think it’s beautiful and awe-inspiring and amazing in all its chaos, and I fundamentally don’t want to destroy that. I feel like I’m constantly repeating this on here because somehow it seems like deeply held pluralist values are just really rare.
On the other hand, I’m conscious of the ethical burden this sort of thing places on society. There are, in fact, things I am fully against—various forms of violence and suffering and so on—things I truly believe have no place in the world. And this leaves me conflicted! A truly pluralistic society would, at some level, have to accommodate these things too. But of course pluralism isn’t my only value, it’s tempered by many others, and in the end there are some things I don’t want society to accommodate. But deciding precisely what these things are is hard: from a utilitarian perspective, everything that isn’t ruthless optimization for the Good is, in some sense, evil. I am actively opposed to taking things that far, but if I have any ethics at all (which I do), the line must be drawn somewhere. I think that precisely where to draw it is the single biggest philosophical struggle that I have, politically speaking.
Anyway, just trying to articulate this again. I feel very… unusual in looking at things this way.
It always sound weak and tenuous when people get into the specifics of what causes it. But America is a uniquely sick culture, no other place has these kinds of mass shootings. They happen occasionally in other places but literally orders of magnitude less frequently
I’m really not sure there is such a thing as a “uniquely sick culture”. Maybe I’m just excessively [everything is actually the same]-brained, but you’re gonna need to justify this one.
Right-wing Rat-Adj Guys: “Wokeness is an insincere façade. All this supposed concern about race and gender is just a ruse put on by corporations and the professional-managerial class to cover up their own misdeeds, create opportunities for their own petty authoritarianism, and impose a new puritanical moral system on the public that distracts from real problems and enforces a new conformity! Wake up sheeple!”
Me: “Ok, ok, I like where this is going. So we’re gonna talk about material issues now, yeah? About the distribution of wealth and the power relations of property ownership? Unions? UBI? The endless expansion of corporate power?”
Right-wing Rat-Adj Guys: “What, no? I just want to bring back segregation who cares about any of that shit.”
This post is a continuation about life in “Quarantine”. I put it into quotation marks because the reality is, my life has not changed that dramatically. We’ve hit a month since the state of California had the order to shut everything down and although it was definitely a weird shift… I think a lot of us are getting used to a rhythm of life.
Thank you for checking out another post of mine. A while back I decided to include one personal post. I titled it Personal Tuesday’s. My goal was to check in and hopefully share my experiences and struggles and create a spot where we could all just kind of cheer each other on etc. It started out great and then I stopped writing them altogether. It is a weird feeling to feel so…
