Sunday, February 04, 2007
Affluenza
I review Oliver James's Affluenza in The Sunday Times today. On balance, I seem to have been nicer about the book that I should have been. Its major theme is a banality and the two ideas that support it - that nurture is all and nature nothing and that America is the root of all evil - are simply wrong. But I have a nasty feeling that I was influenced by this. It's an article by Peter Wilby trashing, very unpersuasively, my newspaper. But he doesn't exactly trash me. He calls me 'the most cerebral, if gloomy, writer in the industry.' Cerebral? Well, yes, obviously. But gloomy? Moi? I suspect I was thinking about this when I wrote the review and, as a result, gave James an easier ride than he deserved. It's a butterfly in Tokyo effect. Wilby reaches for a word, settles on 'gloomy' and, as a result, James's breakfast is less disturbed than it might have been. I am a speck in the chaotic flux.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
According to surveys, more people now declare themselves to be unhappy than used to be the case. But does this really mean that people are less happy, or does it merely indicate that people have become more self-analytical due to pop-psychology such as Mr James's? Perhaps the belief that one is unhappy is itself a virus.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the New Scientist review of Affluenza, there's a high suicide rate in Denmark. That's rather interesting.
Gloomy? You? Perched on a gravestone with such a sweet smile.
ReplyDeleteA mere speck? I can see where Wilby is coming from. Lighten up, man. Of course, it will definitely happen, but at least you will have seen it coming. You're a speculative speck. An ideas speck. Most of us are just job specks. Surely that's something to be cheery about in this confusing world.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting from Sushil.
ReplyDeleteAs a younger more stoned me wrote
And when you've come to the end of your tether, there's nothing to do but mediate between the last and next moments of action
And surrender to the silence of unthinking isness.
I don't buy the premise that "a thinking mind cannot feel." C'mon.
ReplyDeleteI think I might have to subscribe to that Guardian-media web-site, because you keep linking to it Bryan. I am worried, however, that it will be the thin end of the wedge, and the next I know, Polly Toynbee or George Monbiot will be popping in for a cup of tea, and lecturing me on the welfare state, and the benefits of lentil-powered buses.
ReplyDeleteOh, and mind the gap, Sushil!
Ok, I've registered with the MediaGuardian website, and read the Peter Wilby article. He claims that The Sunday Times captured the zeitgeist in the 1980s, but "One is never quite sure what the present paper stands for." But surely such ambivalence exactly captures the current zeitgeist? I don't know what Mr Blair, Mr Brown or Mr Cameron stand for.
ReplyDeleteSushil presents these ideas in very stark and dogmatic terms. And ironically, in a very mechanistic way. Presumably, this was intentional, given what is being said, and to ensure that the message gets through to emotional cripples like me. Of course, there is something to this thesis, but it is not that simple at all (what is?) Also, I found the gaps between sentences disconcerting (I was having panic attacks).
ReplyDeleteWhat were you smoking back then, Andrew? Glad you weren't in my gang, I was prone to losing the plot.
ReplyDeleteI presume this is meant at a deeper level than simply someone who thinks is cut off from emotion, but that a mind constantly engaged in the verbal world is in a sense running a programme, and the mind that acually produces thought is rendered invisible as there is no space for it to reveal itself. I think an example of such activity is in modern art where rather than a direct visual experience, so much of this garbage(there is no negativity meant when I describe this art as garbage) exists simply to provoke thought, to set one thinking about some fascinating subject or other. Comparatively has Van Gogh any interest in attempting to provoke thought, I wonder.
ReplyDeleteMostly low-grade hashish from low-grade hashish dealers, Neil.
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