The Nation published an essay by Nicholas von Hoffman called A Devil’s Dictionary of Business which seems to be based on his book by the same name.
The original Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is a classic of political satire. It is in the public domain and can be downloaded at Project Gutenberg. Bierce was cynical and skeptical, and he made few friends when he stripped away pretensions and popped the ballooned egos of the comfortable and the powerful.
I mentioned John Ralston Saul’s Doubter’s Companion in an entry in July. It fits into the tradition of satirical dictionaries.
Category: Zombies
Scientific Pharisees
There is a feature article on Richard Dawkins in the September 2005 issue of Discover magazine, by Stephen S. Hall, Darwin’s Rottweiler. It isn’t in the archives yet – only the first few paragraphs are on line. Hall credits the title of his article to Alister McGrath, in his book Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life. It plays on the nickname for Thomas Henry Huxley – Darwin’s bulldog. It also plays on one of the nicknames – God’s Rottweiler – given to Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) by the media for his ferocious defences of Catholic orthodoxy during his tenure as prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It implies that Dawkins is dogmatic and intolerant. Hall presents an overview of Dawkins’ work, with some attention to his limitations as a communicator. He is a good writer, and presents science to the general public in clear, accessible and poetic language. He is a well-recognized celebrity intellectual. Hall reports on Dawkins’ appearance in a panel discussion on the usual issue – how scientific views of evolution and religiously based views of a divinely created world should be presented in public schools. He reports on Dawkins’ turning on people who agree with him that Creation science and Intelligent design are phony, because they say they have religious beliefs and can reconcile scientific theories with their own religious belief. He seems to alienate them, and parts of a a friendly audience. Dawkins seems to have earned the Rottweiler nickname honestly. In spite of his charm, intelligence, and verbal skills, his social and political judgment seems to be impaired. This has allowed religious writers like McGrath to marginalize him as a fanatic, and to discredit his arguments.
Ruse on Evolution
In May, the Boston Globe (online) published an interview of zoologist, philosopher of science and popular writer Michael Ruse discussing his new book The Evolution-Creation Struggle. More recently, the American Scientist Online published another interview. The book expands on the arguments made in an article Is Evolution a Secular Religion, published in Science Magazine in March 2003.
I noticed a preliminary review of Ruse’s book and commented on it in an entry called Atheists, Darwinists.
Essay on Anti-Semitism
This essay – The Anti-Semitic Disease – by historian Paul Johnson, published in Commentary is certainly interesting. It has some good information about the history of anti-semitism in the West and in the Arab World, but it takes an odd spin.
Video Game Theories
Journalist and writer Steven Johnson (Steven Berlin Johnson) has been riding a wave. His latest book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter presents a defence of video games. Before he became the leading apologist for the video game industry, he wrote an emerging technology column in Discover and had written a few books on technology, communication and popular culture. His writing supports and justifies the role of new toys in popular culture. Sometimes a hint of mystical reverence for the power of change and progress creeps in.
Last Friday (July 29) the Winnipeg Free Press published Getting Too Serious about Play, credited to Johnson and the Los Angeles Times. I found this short opinion piece published by the LA Times on July 27 – Hillary vs. The XBox which made the basic points, although it seemed to be shorter than what I read in the Free Press. He also has a feature article in the July issue of Discover Magazine titled Your Brain on Video Games. He was interviewed by the Washington Post in June.
Law and Literary Criticism
An essay – Gone Fishing – by Scott McLemee appeared in the online version of Inside Higher Education last week. The title plays on the name and status of Stanley Fish, celebrity public intellectual.
The essay and the Wikipedia entry both mention Fish’s ideas about reader-response theory and the interpretive community, and the ambiguity of Fish’s relationship to literary and social theories of deconstruction.
Some of Fish’s ideas are almost self-evidently true. Literary works are complex sets of words organized to communicate meaning through complex symbols. A literary text contains a narrative description of real or realistic events as imagined by the writer, presenting meaning within a story of people in conflict, the imagined psychology of the characters, and layers of imagery and metaphor. The reader’s response to the story depends on the reader’s way of unpacking the story. Readers will differ with one another and with the writer over the meaning of words and events, partly because language is a cultural endeavor, inherently imprecise across place and time.
Fish’s suggestion that judges, or judges and lawyers are a privileged community seems to describe part of the legal process very well. The law of a place or a people is made up of words pronounced by authoritative persons – rulemakers accepted within the prevailing culture as sovereign authorities. Lawyers and judges spend a great deal of time and energy quarrelling about the words used in Constitutions, statutes, contracts and judicial opinions, in a theoretical effort to reach a principled, rational understanding. In common practice actual cases are decided by the instinctive or intuitive sense of justice of the judges hearing the case, as conditioned by the values of their interpretive community.
Back to the Cuckoo’s Nest
Theodore Dalrymple’s essay In the Asylum in the summer 2005 issue of City Journal is worth reading. It caught my attention because I have spent a fair amount of time on law and social policy around mental health. Dalrymple was a forensic psychiatrist, and his essay demonstates the professional frustration of the medical psychiatry with human rights laws that restrict that profession’s ability to intervene. He discusses one incident where he obviously thought it best, on behalf of prison authorities, to sedate and treat a psychotic inmate.
His essay is informative but polemical. In Canada, the law permits intervention to treat a patient who lacks capacity to make informed decisions. The focus is on the patient’s capacity, and not on whether the patient’s decisions correspond to a psychiatrist’s assessment of what is a patient’s best interests. For the curious, a link to the 2003 judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in Starson v. Swayze.
His dissection of the ideas of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault is adept. I agree with his criticisms of R.D. Laing, whose views were naive, romantic, unscientific and unrealistic. I agree with some his criticisms of Foucault, but I think he has largely failed to deal with the substance of Foucault’s argument. He tries to undermine Foucault with ad hominem arguments – bashing him as gay French intellectual doesn’t help to identify or answer Foucault’s critique of therapeutic justice. Foucault made sound points about the loss of dignity inherent in an institutional life and power struggles between patients and care givers. Foucault pointed out that the rhetoric of helping patients obscures the fact that society intervenes to protect itself, and that human dignity is sacrificed in the quest to make the mentally ill safely invisible.
Van Gogh Murder News
An update on the stories mentioned in my entry on Pluralism, Dutch Style.
The Dutch Courts have convicted the murderer of Theo Van Gogh. The BBC reported that Mohammed Bouyeri, who has joint Dutch-Moroccan nationality, was convicted of murder. Another BBC report on the public reactions to the case in Holland mentioned that he is going to be charged with terrorist conspiracy offences.
There are difficult aspects to this story. Bouyeri was a disaffected immigrant youth, apparently involved with drug use and street crime. He found new values in fundamentalist Islam, which made helped him live within a strict moral code, connected him to his cultural roots, and gave him a supportive community. It also indoctrinated him in an ideology of moral and cultural superiority and empowered him to become a terrorist and a murderer.
The Doubter’s Companion
The Doubter’s Companion (1994, ISBN 0-670-85536-7) followed Voltaire’s Bastards in Canadian writer John Ralston Saul‘s books on modern economics, politics and culture. His Wikipedia entry identifies him as a philosopher. I see him as a public intellectual and a social critic. His academic background appears to have been in economics. His arguments blend careful analysis with colourful and forceful presentation.
This book is subtitled “a dictionary of aggressive common sense”, which plays out as an alphabetically organized collection of essays running from a few lines to a few pages. His essays explore concerns that are discussed in more detail in several of his other books.
Foucault’s Spirituality
Neat. The English online version of a Turkish paper has a interview with James W. Bernauer, the American author of several books on the French philosopher Michel Foucault, tied in to the publication of a Turkish translation of one of his books. Bernauer teaches at Boston College and many of his books and papers identify him as James w. Bernauer S.J. which indicates that he is a member of the Jesuits, and therefore a Catholic scholar.
Bernauer says that Foucault’s later writings looked at philosophy as a method of care for the self and spirituality as a method of resisting the ideology of power imposed over individuals by society.