Picture the tragic scenes in Crouch End, north London, early this year. The patrons of Harris Hoole, a local coffee shop, had just learned to their horror that the supermarket chain Tesco owns a 49 per cent stake in the company. Shaken caffeine-guzzlers told the Guardian that they felt “duped” and “upset” because they’d thought it was an “independent” coffee shop. A rival coffee hawker sneered that Tesco was “trying to make money” out of “artisan values” – although, presumably, so was he. Most charmingly, the manager of the café confided that head office had instructed her to make the store feel as independent as possible. “We try to be independent,” she said. “We want to be independent. We want to have that feel.”She is right: we all want to have that feel. But the appropriation by Tesco and Harris Hoole of the consumer allure of “independence” and “artisan values” is a symptom of our present predicament: there is no way out of simulation. What we get in an “authentic” cultural product is still a simulacrum, but one that insists even more loudly that its laminated, wood-effect veneer is the real thing. Authenticity is now yet another brand value to be baked into the commodity, and customers are happy to take this spectral performance of a presumed virtue as the truth.
A spread from ‘The Dark’, written by Lemony Snicket. Comes out April 2nd!
And so scientists are busily animadverting on Nagel’s account of science. They like to note condescendingly that he calls himself a “layman.” Yet too many of Nagel’s interlocutors have been scientists, because Mind and Cosmos is not a work of science. It is a work of philosophy; and it is entirely typical of the scientistic tyranny in American intellectual life that scientists have been invited to do the work of philosophers. The problem of the limits of science is not a scientific problem. It is also pertinent to note that the history of science is a history of mistakes, and so the dogmatism of scientists is especially rich. A few of Nagel’s scientific critics have been respectful: in The New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr has the decency to concede that it is not at all obvious how consciousness could have originated out of matter. But he then proceeds to an almost comic evasion. Finally, he says, we must suffice with “the mysteriousness of consciousness.” A Darwinii mysterium tremendum! He then cites Colin McGinn’s entirely unironic suggestion that our “cognitive limitations” may prevent us from grasping the evolution of mind from matter: “even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.” Students of religion will recognize the dodge—it used to be called fideism, and atheists gleefully ridiculed it; and the expedient suspension of rational argument; and the double standard. What once vitiated godfulness now vindicates godlessness.
The sad truth is that most families who stretched their finances to the limit for the sake of a set of encyclopædias would have been better off spending half that money or less on books with beginnings, middles and ends that children might actually read. In many homes, by sheer weight and volume, encyclopædia sets often added up to more than all the other books in the house put together. While they were the most admired volumes on the shelf, they were also the least read. Sure, every now and again someone would say: ‘Look it up in the encyclopædia,’ or you’d go searching for a fact that was eluding you. More often than not, however, you wouldn’t find it. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who didn’t even really understand the difference and relationship between the 17-volume macropædia and the 12-volume micropædia; or the two-volume index and the one-volume propædia. Trying to find anything in there made me feel like the baffled child who asks how to spell a word and is told to look it up in the dictionary; how can you find the word if you can’t spell it in the first place? No wonder only a tiny fraction of the 44 million words in the Encyclopædia Britannica were ever read, and most of the 30,000-odd pages were never even opened. The volumes gathered dust because we literally didn’t know how to use them.
laughingsquid:Fahrenheit 451 Book Cover With a Match and Striking PaperThis is just plain brilliant. Love the type too.~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
The history of literature is replete with folly but the news that Sebastian Faulks is writing a novel featuring Reginald Jeeves and Bertram Wooster knocks all other blunders into a cocked-hat. We are not gruntled.Madness, not to put too fine a point on it, seems the only explanation for such a project. Perhaps, like Gussie Fink-Nottle, Mr Faulks is a glutton for punishment. Like the newt-fancier, one supposes he must spend a good deal of time staring at himself in the mirror.
As for the rest of us, well, like the BBC’s present lamentable adaptation of Blandings this news has us groaning and wincing “like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch”.
Funky FlyerReminiscent of a woodblock print, this intricately composed flyer is for an event at the Baby Jupiter club, Leeds, UK. I like the feeling of looking through a secret (if slightly psychedelic) door way. Designed by Danny PiG
SIR: I am grateful for the review which my book Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England received from the Provost of Kings (Mr Bernard Williams) in the London Review of Books (LRB, 2 April), and in particular for his perceptiveness in knowing how pleased I would be at having it described as ‘clotted and ill-natured’, as bearing an equivocal relationship to its chief argument, as using Christianity as a vehicle of Sarcasm, and as having ‘dark associations’ with the ‘scepticism and distrust of all merely secular improvements which can be found’ amongst ‘the more unreconstructed sort of cardinal’ in the ‘unliberated heartland of the Church of Rome’. I hope I shall not seem ungrateful if I make two critical comments.At various points in his review the Provost states that I am incapable of arguing my opinions. Given that I have a certain articulateness, it is, it seems to me, quite likely that I can argue them. Argument, however, is not what it seems to me suitable to do with opinions. What one does with opinions – all one needs to do with them, having found that one has them – is to enjoy them, display them, use them, develop them, in order to cajole, press, bully, soothe and sneer other people into sharing (or being affronted by) them. To argue them is, it seems to me, a very vulgar, debating-society sort of activity.
— Maurice Cowling, responding to Bernard Williams’s review of his book (1981). This, I think, offers a master class in how to respond to a negative review.
Ms. Kenney described the blog’s strengths. “When there was an overriding issue or event, the blog was a locus and a magnet, attracting tens of thousands of readers” to a particular post, she said, “with the Deepwater Horizon spill as a great example.”She added, “I’d be the first to admit that the blog was uneven because of a shortage of resources.” It needed a dedicated editor, she said; as deputy environment editor, she was able to give it only a few hours a day, given her other duties.
Here’s my take: I’m not convinced that The Times’s environmental coverage will be as strong without the team and the blog. Something real has been lost on a topic of huge and growing importance. Especially given The Times’s declared interest in attracting international readers and younger readers, I hope that Times editors — very soon — will look for new ways to show readers that environmental news hasn’t been abandoned, but in fact is of utmost importance. So far, in 2013, they are not sending that message.