Fukuyama and Sports Bras

For reasons that are unclear my articles are appearing sporadically or late on the Sunday Times web site. Last week's Fukuyama is now here. This week I explain the place sports bras are playing in David Cameron's election strategy but it doesn't seem to be up yet

Two More Reasons Why It Is Necessary to Love America

1)Frank Fairfield - check out these three vids.

2)Stanley Cavell - especially when he writes about Fred Astaire.

'From the pas de deux of the men, Astaire moves into a trance-like solo, quasi-dancing, quasi-singing in which his realization that he has found his way (back) to dancing strikes him as having found his feet again, as having re-found his body, and his ecstasy is such that when, in his twirling or reeling through the arcade, he comes across a coin-operated photograph booth, he happily manoeuvres his body in it so as to have the picture taken of his feet or shoes (strictly, the shine on his shoes).'

Discuss 15

'... the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.'

Albert Einstein

On Not Being a Gentleman

At the end of his column in the Telegraph, Toby Young tells the story of a man named Bill who gained a poor degree at Brasenose College, Oxford, and was classified by the university's appointments committee as 'not quite' meaning 'not quite a gentleman'. The Bill in question was William Golding who went on to become Brasenose's only ever winner of the Nobel prize. Would the then commitee have changed its mind knowing he was to win the Nobel? Obviously not. Being a gentleman is not conditional on such fripperies. On the other hand, a contemporary committee would be very unlikely to classify anybody as NQG, the term is just too class-laden. This is interesting. I have always been absolutely certain that I am not a gentleman, but I have known a few (Nige is one) - which is just a way of saying I believe in the idea. But what is the idea? Well, as a class distinction, it is somebody who, for example, eats pheasant, has a close relationship with his tailor, takes the weight on his elbows, treats non-gentlemen and women with unwavering courtesy and kills his enemies with immense regret. The pheasant apart, it's a nice package but too specific for me and, in the world in which we now live, it is no use as a defence of the gentleman. Most people will go through life never meeting such a person and, in any case, quite a lot of people who fulfil all those criteria turn out to be absolute swine. After some thought, I have come up with the one qualification that fits men of all classes, though not all creeds. A gentleman is not a fanatic. A fanatic, in this sense, obviously includes militant atheists and creationists and anybody possessed of vulgar certainty, but it also includes those who are fanatical about behaviour. I once wore black suede shoes to a London club and one member told this story for weeks afterwards. This is fanaticism. I would like to think this makes me a gentleman, but I am, alas, prone to red mists of fanaticism, though I never actually believe in this mist. I am working on it, however, and, in time, I hope to be able to look Nige in the eye, gentleman to gentleman.

Thiepval

I wept watching the two minute silence at 11am. I always do. There is something about the First World War that makes my hot tears spurt. Some years ago I visited the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. I went in touristy/aesthete mode - 'Lutyens, good, sometimes great architect. I ought to check this one out.' That didn't last the length of time it took me to get out of the car. For some reason, this object doesn't photograph well. In the brick, the Portland stone and in the sad, sad wind it overwhelms. Lutyens was a genius when he drew this. I know of no greater memorial. I wept continuously and uncontrollably. Go there.

Discuss 14

'Florensky saw a relationship between the naming of 'God' and the naming of sets in set theory: both God and sets were made real by their naming. In fact, the 'set of all sets' might be God himself.'

Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor

Freakonomics and Professor Nutt

Being, in general, unable to listen to myself on radio, I didn't hear last night's Night Waves. As a result, I don't know how much of the conversation I recorded earlier with Steve 'Freakonomics' Levitt was broadcast. Anyway, the first thing I did was pick him up on a line in Superfreakonomics - 'Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work - whereas economics represents how it actually does work.' I said such statements made me reach for my revolver. He reeled at this slightly so I modified 'revolver' to 'water pistol'. The point was lost until, later, I brought it up again and explained what I meant. He had the grace to agree it was a fair point. What I meant was that economics, like any other discipline, is not how the world works, it is a view of how it works. Relegating morality - or art or religion or philosophy or psychology or biology or any number of things - to some secondary category which is, somehow, less real is absurd. These are as much facts in the world as financial transactions or particle colliders.

That is why I'm on the side of Alan Johnson in the Nutt affair. Being preoccupied, I paid no attention to this flurry beyond noting that nice Mr Johnson finally seemed to have acquired a spinal column. I know the legal status of drugs is important, but it is an issue that has never grabbed me.

Then I saw Professor Nutt on television saying something about scientists providing the facts, implying that politicians dealt in some lesser currency. I fumbled for my revolver before remembering, once again, I do not own one. Nutt, who seems to be a hard case, appears to think that there is a realm of 'facts' to which only science has access and conclusions drawn from this realm should be unquestioningly obeyed. He is confused.

Science is a very specialised undertaking. Its methods do, indeed, provide privileged access to certain kinds of knowledge. But they do so by limiting the scope of that knowledge. If the Large Hadron Collider throws up a Higgs Boson, it will be a great and fascinating triumph. However, I don't expect it to have any impact whatsoever on how I shall vote at the next election. In the human sciences, perversely perhaps, I expect even less. Freakonomics is a brilliant and entertaining discipline and that tells much better and more persuasive stories than macroeconomics, but it suffers from the same embarrassing problem. It cannot, as Levitt acknowledged, make reliable or useable predictions. It must, therefore, restrict itself to being a commentary on the world competing with many others.

Nutt's facts may be a slightly different matter, perhaps a touch more exact. They may play a large part in political decision making. But they must compete with other facts that, for the moment and, perhaps, for ever, cannot be reproduced in the laboratory. Facts also happen outside the lab and resigning scientists may be a sign that even this government is, occasionally, capable of governing.

Brown's Condolences

As Nige says, the condolence letter unpleasantness makes one feel sorry for Gordo. Keep this up and he'll win the election on a pity vote. It does prove my own point about the ability of the media to make any war other than the most explicitly defensive almost impossible to conduct. This has been an issue ever since Vietnam, of course. During the Falklands, we dealt with it by imposing ruthless media control. This would now be impossible. This raises the question: what is possible? Brown hasn't got an answer - and neither did Blair - which is why he so flagrantly evades the issue at every opportunity and why we seem to be burdened with a succession of very low quality defence secretaries. Spinning violent death is beyond the spinners.

Naming the Erection

I can exclusively reveal that the Cambridge University Library is to be renamed the Durex Library. The venerable condom maker seized this golden sponsorship opportunity when it was pointed out that the building had been called 'this magnificent erection' at the opening ceremony. In my days under the library's sinister, threatening shadow it was assumed this had been said by George V. Now, it seems, the words that ensured the Durex deal were spoken by none other than Neville Chamberlain.

The Existence of Asperger's

Simon Baron-Cohen complains about the possible removal of Asperger's Syndrome from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. Asperger's is not regarded as sufficiently different from classic autism. The APA book defines mental illness for the world and, crucially, for insurance companies. This has always been an alarmingly subjective business. As Baron-Cohen points out, it is not yet possible to define a mental illness in terms of its causes, only in terms of its symptoms and symptoms, especially mental ones, are slippery things. I am not, to my knowledge, mentally ill. But I have just been reading Melanie Klein - brilliant - and she seemed to nail me on a number of counts. In fact, I suspect she nails most of us. That amounts to a character study, not a diagnosis, and no treatment is required, certainly not prolonged encounters with Gabriel Byrne. Yet, doubtless, I could get hold of the APA 'bible' and find something wrong with me. At the other end of the spectrum, however, lies Asperger's, a real and terrible condition. But there it is, symptom-defined like everything else and subject to the kind of re-ordering to which Baron-Cohen is objecting. Mental illness remains a curiously weightless conception.