Wikipedia’s start page lists anniversaries, selected from a main entry listing events on that date in history. For November 7, 2005, the selections from the general November 7 entry include the beginning of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia (it was October on the Julian calendar in Russia), the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.
For Canadians, the Last Spike in the CPR at Craigellachie BC in 1885. For Canadian nationalists, a song and a poem and links to photos. The National Archives of Canada have a couple of ways of getting the iconic picture, as a gif image or through a link on a an information page. Or see the section on The Last Spike in the Canadian Encyclopedia’s entry on the construction of the CPR. The CPR has a different photo on photo history page on its Web site. It is a posed photo of follically gifted men in top hats and tails. For hairy Scots, a note in Canadian history and literature.
November 7, 2005
Wikipedia’s start page has a daily featured article, an entry selected as the article of the day. For football fans, on November 7, 2005 the featured article is about the Arsenal Football Club which plays in the FA Premier League in England.
The French urban riots made the front page of the Free Press today – a picture of firefighters trying to put out the fire in a burning car. Wikipedia had a problem with the story over the weekend – competing rewrites and disputes over whether the article overstated the role of Islam in the rioting. They had an objectivity flag on the story on Sunday, but they have worked that out. Their article is now called 2005 French Urban Violence.
La Zone
The Winnipeg Free Press has been running news stories about the riots in French cities, on the inside pages. I don’t think the National Post or the Globe and Mail have treated these stories more prominently, although their stories have had more depth.
The Wikipedia entry has been regularly updated since the riots started, and it links to a number of media sources. The most recent BBC Online story on November 5 links to earlier stories and to stories that try to analyze the background and the political situation. Wikipedia links to Theodore Dalrymple’s essayin City Journal, in August 2002, The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, which took a hard-headed view of the cités of La Zone. (For a note on Dalrymple, see this book review of Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It: the mandarins and the masses in the New Statesman).
Alien Abduction
Beam Me Up Godly Being, by Karen Olsson, in Slate, covers or reviews a book by psychologist Susan Clancy, Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens. The article contains this passage:
In a chapter of The Varieties of Religious Experience called “The Reality of the Unseen,” William James attested to the existence of a “sense of reality” distinct from the other senses, in which “the person affected will feel a ‘presence’ in the room, definitely localized, facing in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard, touched, nor cognized in any of the usual ‘sensible’ ways.” As evidence, James produces several firsthand accounts from people who were visited by “presences” late at night. These have a familiar ring: They sound just like stories from alien abductees, minus the aliens. Objects of belief, James says, may be “quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended.”
… When it comes to the ambitious project of explaining the why and wherefore of “weird beliefs,” Clancy’s book doesn’t tell us too much more than James did: People believe in this stuff because it seems real to them, more real than any reasoning about sleep paralysis or the unreliability of memories produced during hypnosis.
… People’s imagined contacts with aliens, she speculates, arise from “ordinary emotional needs and desires. … We want to believe there’s something bigger and better than us out there. And we want to believe that whatever it is cares about us, or at least is paying attention to us. … Being abducted by aliens is a culturally shaped manifestation of a universal human need.”
Olssen disagrees with Clancy’s ideas about religious impulses. She prefers to think that people who believe they have been abducted by aliens are influenced by pop culture acting on their subconscious minds. That of course raises its own question – is there a subconscious mind, or is the subconscious an arbitary label for flawed perceptions and memories and an excuse for impulsive behaviour?
I think Clancy may be right. Stories of alien abduction are one of the modern variants of stories of miraculous, magical and mystical experiences. People experience something – it may be a random neurochemical event in their brain. They interpret it in a narrative way within the limits of their language and belief systems. They stick to their story in the face of doubts and scepticism. They find, eventually, someone who supports and believes them and shares their experience. They feel special. The event takes on its own meaning. And it becomes a miracle, a vision, a channelled message, an alien abduction.
The references to William James are interesting. He is one of the founders of modern psychology and a reasonably rigorous scientist, but he was always very tolerant of spiritualism – perhaps because he could never directly challenge his father who was a prominent proponent. His early version of philosophical pragmatism and his philosophy of religion seem to have been set up to cut spiritualists some slack.
Another way of looking at it is that James was inclined to speculative thought – but people didn’t like to argue with such a well connected and presentable member of New England Society.
Terrible Beauty
It was an impulsive purchase, which proved to be worthwhile. I was looking for something else in the Ideas and philosophy section of the Grant Park McNally Robinson store when I noticed Peter Watson’s A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind. (ISBN 1-84212-444-7). With end notes and index, 847 pages of small type. It was the Orion Press British paperback edition. The book has also been published in the US as Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century.
Watson is a journalist, and an experienced writer. He seems to have an insatiable curiosity and wide interests. His other published work has tended to relate to the visual arts, but that only covers part of his work. His style is smooth and fluent, only occasionally lapsing into journalistic bombast and cliches.
Psychic
On Tuesday (Nov. 1) I flew back to Winnipeg from Victoria, through Edmonton and Saskatoon. I had a window seat. The middle seat was vacant. A passenger who got on in Edmonton took the aisle seat.
Last week a couple of Mormon missionaries wanted to talk to me on the street. What is it about me that suggests I am waiting to be proselytized?
Blackadder strikes
The Guardian reports, in a story called Lords defeat for religious hatred bill, that the House of Lords voted against the British government’s Religious and Racial Hatred Bill. The opposition to the Bill crossed party lines with many Labour peers joining Liberal Democrats and Conservatives in opposing the Bill. The government can still override the Lords and pass the Bill into law in the Commons, which is a special process to break deadlock between the two House of the British Parliament. For background, here are the British government’s explanatory notes on the Bill as passed in the House of Commons, and here is the Bill after the amendments. These links to debate and more debate on the amendments in the House of Lords bring up the Hansard text. The quality of speeches is excellent. This level of debate makes Canadian MP’s sound like trolls.
I like a passage from Lord Onslow’s speech:
I also suggest that, in the well-established case of a Shia cleric who ensured the conviction of a young girl, aged 18, for pre-marital sexual intercourse, he not only advocated her conviction but he also went and put the noose around her neck. I do not know about noble Lords, but I personally find that detestable. It is meet to be detested, and should be by every single person in this Chamber. What this Bill could do—although I am obviously open to correction—is to say that I could be prosecuted for saying that it was a detestable habit and that the man who did it was an odious human being. I would say that with intent, and mean every single word. I give that as one example.
At Second Reading, the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said that religion had actually been defined. Now there is, as we know through evidence of it, a religion involving witchcraft and the mutilation of small boys. Their torsos were thrown into the Thames. I know that these things are illegal, but it seems odd to me that I cannot hate them. I may have misinterpreted the Bill; I may have it all wrong. But I am advised that I have not. Can the Minister clear my mind, and either accept the amendment or something like it in whatever form the Bill takes? Or can she explain to me that there is no such provision in the Bill and that I am quite entitled to go on hating Shia clerics who pull the legs of young girls dangling in a noose outside Tehran?
Liverpool
Sentimental, gullible, mistaken, pro-life, animal rights? What to make of the Liverpudlians who left flowers for a dead foetus for days after the police had announced it was only a chicken? Story from Liverpool Daily Post.
Alpe d’Huez
Sports fans – the 2006 Tour de France route is set. News at BBC Sports, Bicycling and the Tour site.
Wikipedia
My friend Randy, who is an academic librarian, recently posted an entry with a section on criticism of Wikipedia. His entry is called Various. He cites an essay called the Amorality of Web 2.0 by Nicholas Carr. I have to agree that the linguistic and cultural implications of Wikipedia are being oversold by the usual assortment of technical writers, visionaries, dreamers and loons. I also agree that the quality of the entries is inconsistent but I think it is not as bad as some of these comments suggest.