But our Eden communities may have the solution. In Great Asby, one volunteer discovered there was already fibre, paid for by the taxpayer, for the school. The school let him splice off the fibre to a cabinet that he calls a ‘parish pump’. From that he ran a wireless network, with transmitters in the church tower and one, powered by solar panels, on a dead tree to reach the outlying farms. He has persuaded 70% of the village to sign up and is making enough money (as an unpaid volunteer) to upgrade the network. Local farmers have agreed to lay the fibre, at a fraction of the commercial cost. This is not a just impressive technology, it’s astonishing community action. And it suggests a model for rural Britain. The 130 activists who drove to Great Asby are now aiming to replicate it in 100 more villages. They have established a new website – though some of them have to drive to Penrith to log on. Libby, in Kirkby Stephen, is photographing and mapping all existing telecoms cabinets. Freddy, in Morland, is exploring alternative technologies from microwave transmitters and wireless hubs, to laying fibre in sewers. Five out of six farmers around Crosby Ravensworth have offered to forego wayleave charges and help dig trenches. Kate, in Stanwix, is training people to get online. Daniel, in Alston, is piloting medical tests from homes. How far can this go?
It is precisely because Ramadan is unsympathetic to the idea of individual autonomy and moral independence that he can casually dismiss tolerance as the intellectual charity of the powerful. Tolerance is anything but charity. It refuses to suppress beliefs and views that are judged to be erroneous because it recognises that it is through the exercise of individual autonomy that greater clarity about the truth can be gained. In the end, everyone gains from toleration, since it is through exposure to conflicting views that society acquires certain insights and experiences an intellectual and moral flourishing.Ramadan’s rejection of tolerance is driven by hostility towards the idea of critical judgment. But how can a ‘Quest for Meaning’ proceed without a capacity to judge? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ramadan’s exhortation to ‘Judge Not’ is about evading making serious choices between different ways of life. ‘Avoiding Meaning’ would perhaps have been a better title for this book.
‘The universal reaction to book lists,’ I wrote a few days ago, 'is annoyance over what has been left out.’ I should have added: followed immediately by an accusation of bias. If you don’t happen to think very highly of a writer—and if, because space limitations make explanation impossible, you are silent about the writer—you will be said to hold a grudge against the class to which the writer belongs. Worse yet, if you fail to mention a sufficient number of members of the writer’s class, although the required proportion remains vague and undefined, you will be dismissed as irredeemably intolerant if not bigoted toward the entire class.I don’t know why it took so long for me to figure out what was going on. The accusation of bias has been leveled against me so often that I no longer take it seriously. Only recently, though, did it strike me that the accusation is more than simply a moral fashion. It is a learned response, an intellectual commonplace, picked up in school and college like mono or herpes. It is the voice of the academic literary guild, stripped of any theoretical sophistication, coming from the mouths of latter-day undergraduates who still hope for their professors’ approval.
Now that I have a family of my own, we do observe the changing of the calendar year in our own tepid way. A glass of champagne at midnight on New Year’s Eve, a few mince pies—that sort of thing. My wife, being English, also likes to scare up a few Christmas crackers to pull open, for the amusement of our son, who quite likes having a reason to stay up late.But, on the whole, it is still a minor observance for us, and nothing to compare to the celebrations we like to hold on Twelfth Night, the eve of Epiphany, when the last of the Christmas presents are opened, games are played, and the decorations come down from the tree. (I know many Americans think of Christmas as a single day and like to clear away the trappings of the season well before the fifth of January, but that is sheer barbarism, if you ask me, morally only a few steps removed from human sacrifice, cannibalism, or golf.)
posts unwritten, end-of-year edition, part 2
posts unwritten, end-of-year edition, part 2
How interesting would it be to have a writer’s every keystroke recorded and played back? Pretty interesting, perhaps, but I don’t want it to happen to me.
Though I think Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon…
From the Atlantic’s Kodachrome gallery
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kD_M50-V6s?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
Just extend each shot by 10x and you’ll have a Tarkovsky film.
opting out, revisited
Regular readers, if I have any regular readers, will know that this is the kind of thing I strongly disagree with:
Overwhelmed by all the noise, some have simply chosen to block it out — to opt…
In the late ‘90s I started an awkward—some might say excruciating and as-yet incomplete—transition from graduate student to freelance journalist. For the young, lordly know-nothing, this might seem like a natural progression: it’s not. Early on in your new career, you discover that no one gives a fig about your soon-to-be-former pretensions. They want your prose to be precise and matter-of-fact; they want you to get to the point, and briskly; and they don’t as a rule find you charming. Every word you write for a general interest publication is examined through the anticipated experience of an imagined ideal reader, leaving no eye whatsoever trained on your genius. It’s the best capstone to a liberal education one could ask for.
A justly famous scene from Tarkovsky’s The Mirror