normblog

Songs of love and heartbreak 47

Treat me like a fool,
Treat me mean and cruel,
But love me.
Wring my faithful heart,
Tear it all apart,
But love me.

You get the picture. It's not quite 'shadow of your dog', but it's in that general vicinity. Hence 'I would beg and steal [etc]'. It's a song of love for the ages.

[The series is introduced and indexed here.]

Not mock mocking on Heaven's door

Round at Vukutu, Peter takes me (and Richard Norman) to task over the relationship between religious practice and religious belief. Peter's complaint is threefold. First, he rejects the idea - as expressed in this case by Richard Norman, but defended also by me - that practices like praying only make sense in the light of certain beliefs about what the practices are doing. Second, Peter says that I mock the motivations of the religious. Third, he asserts that 'intelligent people may act without first having a well-grounded belief to justify their actions'.

Peter's first point trades upon a subtle shift of reference and falls to a simple self-contradiction. Richard Norman had said that prayer depends on the belief that there is 'someone... being addressed' in the prayer. Peter replies: not necessarily. 'Only a literalist', he says, '... would imagine that the syntax of an utterance represents the full extent of its possible meanings or uses'. And he then continues:

Rather, most people who pray or chant or sing hymns or attend church do so in order to commune with what they consider to be (or might be) a non-material realm, the divine.

Now, (a) the argument here is about a wide social practice and not about this or that individual. There may well be, here and there, people praying with any number of different motivations - some, perhaps, only to be part of a ritual that unites them with others - but I agree with Richard Norman that the practice as a whole, for most of its practitioners, presupposes some belief that would make sense of that practice. (b) It may be the case that not everyone praying thinks about prayer as supplication, but Peter merely asserts that this isn't usually so; pending some evidence in support of his assertion, I will merely counter-assert that I think it very often is so. And (c) - decisively - even for those for whom prayer is not usually a form of supplication, the belief that it is a way of 'commun[ing] with what they consider to be (or might be) a non-material realm' is itself a belief of exactly the sort that I, and Richard Norman, and others sceptical about Karen Armstrong's claims regarding practice and belief assert to be involved: it is a belief about something independent of the believer and making sense of what the prayer is supposed to be for or about; it concerns something external to the believer - a 'realm' - about which people who have a questioning approach to life are entitled to ask, 'What is the evidence for this?'

As for my supposed mockery of the motivations of the religious, Peter tracks it to this post. Well, I won't deny a certain mischievous intent there, but the fact is the post's primary purpose was to put forward an argument. This argument, as anyone can check for herself, was that if a person's uncorroborated experience, a mere 'sighting', suffices to validate their having been in the presence of the divine, why would the same thing not also suffice in cases where... where we typically don't accept it as doing that? The fact that I expressed the thing in a lighthearted way, not in accents of unrelieved earnestness, is not something I'll be apologizing for. I do not mock or ridicule religious people, and I have spent time on this blog opposing that impulse and some of its contemporary themes - 'religion poisons everything' and all the rest of it. But, as an atheist, I'm entitled to argue my corner, and in the post in question I was responding to - precisely - an argument from the other, religious corner, put out in a national newspaper and hence in the great big public domain. Sauce for the goose, therefore, if I may say so.

Intelligent people, finally, do indeed sometimes act without first having a well-grounded belief to justify their actions. They do it all the time. Sometimes you may plan to do a particular thing after lunch, knowing all the good reasons why you made that plan, and then you just don't do it - without either rhyme or reason. You don't feel like it, is all. But, reminding us of this, Peter evades the specific point in contention by recourse to a generality. The question is not whether people sometimes act without a considered reason, but whether a specific, age-old human practice - namely, prayer - involves any beliefs about the nature and existence of entities external to the people doing the praying. That not all action is prompted by prior justifying beliefs no more establishes that prayer generally isn't than it establishes that the taking of aspirin generally isn't.

Exceptional misdeeds

Suppose that you and Marmaduke Turtlebrow, similarly placed financially, are both considering stealing the money that has been collected to build a new hospital in a particularly deprived area of Malawi. You duly decide that this would be a low thing to do and you wouldn't be able to sleep easily afterwards. Marmaduke Turtlebrow steals the money. After buying himself a smart shirt, he gambles the rest away. Are you and Turtlebrow equally guilty? Are you both as bad as each other? Let's also bring in Marmaduke's sister, Martha Turtlebrow. Unlike her brother, she doesn't steal the money; unlike you, she doesn't even consider stealing it. Is she, too, as guilty and as bad as her brother is?

Dumb questions, you may think; but it's an ever-repeated theme of cultural and other public discussion that something like this spread of guilt and wickedness may be the truth of the matter about humankind. Here is Toby Young reviewing Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (Haneke, about whom I've already posted in this same connection). Young writes:

Ironically, it doesn't seem to have occurred to him [Haneke] that such deep-rooted pessimism may itself be a source of comfort. If Man is essentially an aggressive creature, requiring only the flimsiest of excuses to set upon the weak and the vulnerable, then that lets the Austro-German people off the hook. According to Haneke's view of mankind, there was nothing exceptionally evil about the Third Reich; it was just an extreme expression of a universal human trait. No need to feel guilty, then - or, at least, no more guilty than any member of the human race. The message of this disturbing, nihilistic film is that we're all Nazis at heart.

No and no. No, we're not; and no, even someone who is, is better for not behaving like a Nazi than if he goes right ahead. In connection with some comparable remarks from Liliana Caviani, Primo Levi once wrote:

I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.

Even Primo Levi one might want to qualify: it can be important to know what lurks in the depths. But his is the sounder wisdom nonetheless. If we need to know this, it is because we need to know what can happen, what people are capable of doing, including maybe us; and it is in order to know what must not be done. It is not so as to embrace the guilt of the murderers, to excuse it by pretending it is unremarkable, universal, thereby to make easier future participation in new episodes that would create yet further guilt.

The normblog profile 321: Russell Blackford

Russell Blackford was born in Sydney, Australia, and grew up near Newcastle, 100 miles north. He will be returning to Newcastle at the end of 2009, after 30 years in Melbourne. He is a philosopher, literary critic, and (sometimes) creative writer. His books include Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction (1999, co-written with Van Ikin and Sean McMullen); 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists (2009, co-edited with Udo Schuklenk), and several novels. Russell is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Evolution and Technology. He blogs at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.

Why do you blog? > A mixture of keeping in touch with friends and loved ones, trying out ideas (my blog is my sandpit) and, of course, shameless self-promotion.

What are your favourite blogs? > Pharyngula (P.Z. Myers), Why Evolution Is True (Jerry Coyne), Butterflies and Wheels - Notes and Comment (Ophelia Benson).

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Epicurus, Galileo Galilei, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell.

What are you reading at the moment? > I've just finished The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, by Richard Dawkins.

What is your favourite poem? > Almost anything by W.B. Yeats. He was a nut, but he could sure use the English language. If I must name just one, I'll go for 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul'. But it would be nice to throw in 'News for the Delphic Oracle'.

What is your favourite movie? > Blade Runner.

What is your favourite song? > Anything by Kate Bush.

Who is your favourite composer? > Bach.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > I've changed my mind on many such issues. E.g., once I was a utilitarian, but I'm now a moral pluralist (of a kind). Once I was an evangelical Christian, but now I'm an atheist.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > Morality exists to serve us; we don't exist to serve it.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Political power should be used to serve Providence, or History, or God's Plan.

Who are your political heroes? > Bob Hawke, Bill Clinton.

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > Take individual liberty seriously. Repealing prohibitions on all the well-known recreational drugs would be a good place to start.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > The best is yet to come. It's not going to be easy, but enough with all the defeatism and gloom.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Don't let your life slip away.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > No.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Kindness.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Cruelty.

What is your favourite proverb? > 'The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.'

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > I'd do my PhD in philosophy the first time round. It's nice having two doctorates, really it is, but one would have been enough.

Who would play you in the movie about your life? > Jake Busey.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > The south of France.

What would your ideal holiday be? > It would involve a warm, tropical ocean, a group of much-loved friends, and (temporary) freedom from cares.

What is your most treasured possession? > My photo albums.

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? > Julian, as in the Apostate.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > Barrister. I was headed that way at one point, and I'd have made a reasonable fist of it.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > It'd be Bill Maher, except for his kooky ideas about scientific medicine.

Who are your sporting heroes? > Muhammad Ali, Allan Border, Marat Safin.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > I honestly wouldn't change very much, apart from giving large amounts of the money to causes that I support. Beyond that, it would be nice getting to fly better than cattle class.

What animal would you most like to be? > Some kind of big cat. Maybe a lion or a leopard. Or maybe just a big, pampered house cat.

[The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature. A list of all the profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Susan's landing

Susan Hill spent a year reading or re-reading only books she could already find somewhere in the house. The result of this self-restriction is her volume Howards End is on the Landing, in which she talks about her reading from early childhood to last week - or, at any rate, to the time of writing. 'Talks about' conveys accurately both the tone and method of the book, because it reads as if the author is sitting chatting to you, and she moves from one broad reading-related topic to another without any apparent system, but merely conversationally, picking up a connection at the end of one chapter and taking it into the next, or even just hopping from one theme or author to another on the fly.

I just finished reading the book, and it's a gem. It is a book from which a love of the printed word shines out. By change of metaphor, it breathes a love of reading and of books on every page. It does so without ever becoming narrow or its focus too obsessively restricted, and this is because of the conversational, as it were episodic method. Susan writes both about the 'inside' and the 'outside' of a lifetime's reading: not only about the content of the books themselves, of the works of those authors to whom she devotes more than a passing reference; but also about the look and the feel of the volumes containing these works, the different editions, their location in the various rooms and spaces and shelves in the house, the times when she first read them, the occasions of re-reading, the sitting in the garden and the reading in bed, the writers of the books whom Susan has met or the secondary connections when she hasn't met them, or something she knows about them from biographies or somehow else.

To all of this she brings a vast reading knowledge and extensive personal acquaintance, and she guides her readers along in a voice that is at once chatty, generous and enthusiastic. Is it 'guides' or is it 'nudges'? In one chapter you're reading about books that have made the author laugh, in the next it's Kingsley and Martin Amis, and then it's books that have remained unread by her. Later on we move, without logical transition, from Virginia Woolf nonpareil to books that Susan classifies as the dregs. And, building up through it all, accumulated decades of avid reading. '[J]ust as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me,' Susan says, 'so I am the unique sum of the books I have read.' Building up, likewise, the impression of that house and its rooms full of books. At one point... 'All through the house, the books are murmuring, turning over in sleep like pebbles on the shoreline as the tide recedes.'

Here is Susan on Dickens:

I could spend my year of reading from home with Dickens alone - well, almost. In the silly game of which authors to throw overboard from the lifeboat and which one - just one - to save, I would always save Dickens. He is mighty. His flaws are huge but magnificent - and all of a piece with the whole. A perfect, flawless Dickens would somehow be a shrunken, impoverished one. Yes, he is sentimental, yes, he has purple passages, yes, his plots sometimes have dropped stitches, yes, some of his characters are quite tiresome. But his literary imagination was the greatest ever, his world of teeming life is as real as has ever been invented, his conscience, his passion for the underdog, the poor, the cheated, the humiliated are god-like. He created an array of varied, vibrant, living, breathing men and women and children that is breathtaking in its scope. His scenes are painted like those of an Old Master, in vivid colour and richness on huge canvases. His prose is spacious, symphonic, infinitely flexible. He can portray evil and create a menacing atmosphere of malevolence better than any other writer - read Little Dorritt, read Our Mutual Friend, read Bleak House if you don't believe me. He is macabre, grotesque, moralistic, thunderous, funny, ridiculous, heartfelt. Nobody has ever written as he wrote about London, nobody has described the Essex Marshes so well, nobody has opened a book to such effect as he does in Bleak House. There is no area of life he does not illuminate, no concern or cause he does not make his own, no sentences, no descriptions, no exchanges, no sadnesses or tragedies or betrayals...

I felt, at this point, like cheering.

No gripes, then? Of course there are. How could there not be with such a book, offering as it does so panoramic a view of one person's literary tastes and memories, but with the gaps and differences of judgement there are bound inevitably to be relative to the perceptions and preferences of anybody else? How can someone so right about Dickens be so impervious to the qualities of the divine Jane? How, for that matter, be so impervious to Jane Austen while talking up the novels of Anita Brookner? And why is there not even a mention of...? But stop. That's an idle game. It's one person's reading and not another's, and Howards End is on the Landing is one true beaut of a book. The proof of the pudding is that every few pages it has you itching to read something that Susan has read and you haven't, and the appeal of which she conveys in the most inviting way.

Now, where shall I shelve it?

Do you agree with Richard, Norman?

Richard Norman on practice, ritual and belief:

Of course it's true that a religious community is not a debating society, and a religious service, with its prayers and hymns and rituals, is not an academic seminar whose business is to assess and defend theories. But the key phrase in the passage [quoted by Richard - NG] from Cornwell is "only partly". The asserting of beliefs may not be the main preoccupation of religious activities, but it is still essential. Without the beliefs, the practices make no sense. Prayer is meaningless without a belief of some kind, however vague, that there is someone, a person, who is being addressed. Hymns of praise and adoration are meaningless without some kind of belief in a deity who is worthy of adoration. And there is accordingly no evading the question of whether these beliefs are true. When I listen to, and am emotionally overwhelmed by, a performance of Bach's B Minor Mass, I am presumably experiencing something different from a devout Catholic attending Mass. And the difference must surely lie in the beliefs.

A point which this blog has been at some pains to emphasize. (Thanks: E.)

Remembrance and denial

This is a slightly different angle on things: Azim Hussain, a Montreal lawyer, connecting up Remembrance Day with Holocaust denial, remembers the thousands of Muslim soldiers who died on the Allied side during World War II. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust, he writes, abuses the memory not only the of the Jewish victims but also of those Muslim soldiers. His column details part of the Muslim contribution to the Allied war effort, and from that he concludes:

History is rooted in a common humanity. It is that common humanity that impelled Muslims during World War II to sacrifice their lives for the sake of everyone's freedom, and it is that common humanity that is undermined when Ahmadinejad makes it a hobby to rail against the Holocaust. If he does it in ostensible support for the Palestinians, he should know that the Palestinians do not need such specious "solidarity." Advocating for Palestinian rights does not require a denial of Jewish suffering in World War II.

Indeed - just as upholding the rights of the Jews in Israel does not require a denial of Palestinian suffering in the Nakba.

Truthfulness as chosen

There's an account here of an experimental exercise comparing the brain activity of subjects who give honest responses about what they foresee the result of a coin toss to be and subjects who lie. The researchers findings are as follows:

Greene and Paxton had hypothesized that if deciding to be honest is a conscious process - the result of resisting temptation - the areas of the brain associated with self-control and critical thinking would light up when subjects told the truth. If it is automatic, those areas would remain dark.

What they found is that honesty is an automatic process - but only for some people. Comparing scans from tests with and without the opportunity to cheat, the scientists found that for honest subjects, deciding to be honest took no extra brain activity. But for others, the dishonest group, both deciding to lie and deciding to tell the truth required extra activity in the areas of the brain associated with critical thinking and self-control.

We are told, as well, that the two researchers draw no conclusions from their experiment about how the honest and dishonest groups would behave in non-experimental conditions, so we can leave this issue aside. But, even doing so, I find the way the above-reported result is formulated questionable. Greene and Paxton, the article says, suggest that 'the assumption that deciding to lie or to tell the truth is within our conscious control' may be flawed. Telling the truth might rather be 'an automatic process'.

Naturally, honest people have a default mode when they speak; they tell the truth as a matter of course. As with other things they do regularly, they don't have to work through their reasons for doing it on each separate occasion. 'Should I pay my electricity bill, walk facing forward, drive on the right (i.e., correct) side of the road, look with both eyes, etc, and if so why?' But the claim - on this account anyway - that such actions aren't within our conscious control is a stretch, to put it no more strongly. Even if it takes an instant to adjust when seeing the need, say, for a tactful lie, we can do it just like that. The fact that some things take longer than others doesn't show that the things that take less time aren't chosen, and therefore under our control.

Barack Obama at Fort Hood

From his speech there yesterday:

These are trying times for our country. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same extremists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans continue to endanger America, our allies, and innocent Afghans and Pakistanis. In Iraq, we're working to bring a war to a successful end, as there are still those who would deny the Iraqi people the future that Americans and Iraqis have sacrificed so much for.
.....
We are a nation of laws whose commitment to justice is so enduring that we would treat a gunman and give him due process, just as surely as we will see that he pays for his crimes.

We're a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses. And instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln's words, and always pray to be on the side of God.

We're a nation that is dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal. We live that truth within our military, and see it in the varied backgrounds of those we lay to rest today. We defend that truth at home and abroad, and we know that Americans will always be found on the side of liberty and equality. That's who we are as a people.

Space for offence

Ken Macdonald, writing about English libel law, makes some necessary points:

[O]ur law should be nurturing the free exchange of ideas. It should be protecting research and science. It should allow free and autonomous people to be thoroughly offensive to one another.

Listing

This is a new one on me, but as we've earlier had the meaning of music, why not also the meaning of lists? According to Umberto Eco:

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

Not totally persuaded? Me neither. It explains too much. Death would then explain why we like the sequence of positive integers, and that of prime numbers, and the number of ways of describing the position of a drain in relation to other objects, and the hairs on the head of an opera singer when viewed at different times in the passage of days, and the collection of things in Warsaw, and the collection of things in Salt Lake City, and the words in all the books ever written when put in every possible combination with the other words there, and all the insects in the world when viewed successively while listening to each possible piece of music with more notes than five. Well, maybe it does; but if so, then so also would life explain all that, and so would simple human curiosity.

Imagining Austen

For normblog readers of Janeite inclination, here's a review of an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Edward Rothstein writes about what is on display at 'A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy' to help one try to decipher the ever-elusive genius that was Jane Austen.

The meaning of music

I enjoyed this column by Terry Teachout, but I don't understand one of the questions he poses in it: 'What does music mean?' Not 'What does "music" mean?' (which would be a question like 'What does "resile" mean?') A question not about the meaning of a word, but about the meaning of the thing - music. My first reaction is to ask what the meaning of the question is.

For not everything automatically has a meaning. Words have meanings as part of wider symbolic systems in which there are rules governing the use of those words and enabling us to understand how they function: the sorts of things they refer to (like ducks), or the attitudes they signal (like surprise or pleasure), or the perfomances they enact (like greeting or warning or promising). But things, phenomena, don't necessarily have meanings. What's the meaning of a pebble, a bowl of ice cream or the paper on which this copy of the Bible is printed? Of course, any of these may be assigned a meaning by being included in some system of signification. You and I can agree, for example, that the pebble will henceforth be placed on that window ledge whenever we want to tell one another that we're out. A bowl of ice cream may come to mean, in some household, that Max and Imelda are coming over for the evening. And so forth. But, just so, as objects, things don't always have meanings.

The question 'What does music mean?' might be a question about how we explain music: explain what it does for us, what its appeal is; or explain its function or value in human communities. It might be, then, like 'What do clouds mean?' or 'What does all this ash mean?' or 'What does the failure of the banks mean?' On that basis, however, I would think that music must have many meanings, since there won't be one unilateral way of integrating it within an intelligible system of causal or functional explanation. Think of music as used in religious ceremonies, as celebrating official occasions, as privately enjoyed by an individual, as making so much noise that it stops you thinking, as background to a movie, as facilitating or prompting dance, as inexpressibly wonderful and as utterly rebarbative and mystifying.

The truth in the rhetoric

Jeffrey Engel is against political leaders using what he calls 'the rhetoric of evil' in going to war. He suggests one reason why they do so: to make it clear that their quarrel isn't with the people of the enemy country. Still, he thinks the disadvantages of that rhetoric are several: if you pin the label of 'evil' on an individual tyrant, it makes it harder to envisage a solution to the conflict that doesn't involve his downfall; identifying the conflict with a single human source obscures more systemic sources; tolerance for civilian deaths is more likely when you think the war is aimed against an incarnation of evil. I have my doubts about these points. Political leaders regularly deal with tyrants, however they may have previously (or elsewhere than in those dealings) spoken of them; calling someone an evil tyrant doesn't have to translate into demanding his downfall. Equally, identifying a foul tyrant as being that in no way need obscure systemic aspects either of his rule or of the sources of interstate conflict. No one has to be committed to monocausal explanation. And the laws of war are the laws of war, whatever the nature of the enemy regime.

However, my main quarrel with Engel's argument is that it would forbid political leaders at war from speaking the truth in this matter. For it must surely be granted by anyone who allows that the term 'evil' retains a useful meaning that it sometimes is the truth that countries go to war with other countries that are led by evil people - or, for that matter, are enmeshed in evil systems of power. I can think of one or two well-known wars that fit the bill in this regard, though I won't name them, leaving you to think of them yourself. We are often told that it is a duty to 'speak truth to power'. This duty doesn't have to be confined to academics. Democratically-elected political leaders may also have excellent reasons for naming political evil accurately.

Hizbollesson

I'd never have believed this had I not seen it with my own eyes: Hizbollah have come over to the view that the Holocaust justifies Israel's existence. Only this can explain their putting pressure on a school in Lebanon to pull a textbook from the curriculum because it includes excerpts from The Diary of Anne Frank:

Hezbollah's Al-Manar television channel ran a report slamming the book for focusing on the persecution of Jews.

"What is even more dangerous is the dramatic, theatrical way in which the diary is emotionally recounted," said the report aired last week and also published on the station's website.

It questioned how long Lebanon would "remain an open arena for the Zionist invasion of education."

These fundamentalist movements may be capable of learning, after all. Hizbollah appear to believe that if people pay attention to what happened in Nazi-occupied Europe it might incline them towards thinking the Jews have a right to a state of their own.

Contact hours in university education

There's a post at Comment is Free the general spirit of which I think is spot on, but which omits one crucial consideration. A.C. Grayling argues that the number of contact hours between university students and their teachers is not the crucial feature defining higher education and giving it its specific value. This passage is representative:

University is emphatically not about spoon-feeding and hand-holding through courses, but the very opposite. It is not about maximising contact hours, but about autonomy in thinking, researching and writing. We once used to ask, "What are you reading at university?" In those words lies the clue to what a university education is supposed to involve. People who get into university change educational gear and direction on doing so. They read and attend lectures, they write essays and discuss them with their tutors and peers. To do this in a knowledgeable and intelligent way, they have to do a lot of thinking, studying and discovering, the bulk of it for themselves, because no one else can do it for them.

And Grayling goes on to say that '[t]he more contact hours imposed on students, the less time they have to read, think and write, these being the three crucial elements of higher study.'

From my own experience both as a student and as a university teacher, I believe his emphasis is right. For three years as an undergraduate I'd reckon that my weekly contact hours were between three and four on average - three in tutorials and (at the very most) one attending a lecture. It could have been more, because I could have attended more lectures, but I chose not to. And I have no complaints about the education I got this way, largely based on reading, writing essays once or twice weekly and then discussing these closely with tutors. An education with three or four times as many contact hours but less reading, essay-writing and face-to-face analysis of the topics of those essays isn't as good, as I've witnessed from the teaching side over several decades.

However, a crucial premise of the better way of going about things - and this is the lacuna in Grayling's argument - is that staff-student ratios and other relevant circumstances should permit the one-to-one or, at most, one-to-two tuition that I enjoyed as part of an Oxford education. Reading and writing were central to the experience, but so was the intensive attention and guidance provided by the system of personal tutorials. When I retired from teaching in Manchester, on the other hand, seminar groups might be 12-strong, or sometimes even larger than that, and meeting only fortnightly. So, the argument that the number of contact hours isn't the be-all and end-all makes sense. But the quality of the contact time matters and this depends, among other things, on numbers.

Namechiks

Apparently the Thai government is not best pleased with former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. This is on account of remarks he has made about the country's royal family. As a Thai government spokesman might have put their displeasure with him:

You've been too Frank, Shinawatra.

By which ploy I invite your participation in the following game. Form a sentence in which the name of a person or institution figures, in a not too forced manner, as part of the meaning being conveyed. Let us call such a sentence a namechik. There are then perfect namechiks and imperfect namechiks. A perfect namechik occurs where there is no distortion of the name in question. As in:

Is that you in the John, Milton?

Or

Let's ask for the Bill, Clinton.

Or:

Got any Cheese, Hamlet?

Imperfect namechiks are of two basic types. There is the reverse namechik, in which the two parts of the name are transposed, and of which the following are examples:

Don't beat about the Bush, George.
Have you put on the Kettle, Martin?

And then there is the corrupted namechik, in which some distortion either of a name or of the words it evokes is needed to effect its integration into the sentence. The opening 'Frank Shinawatra' here provides one example of this. Another would be:

Is Boris Godunov as mayor of London?

There are also namechiks that are both reverse and corrupted, such as:

Have you been to any good Giggs, Ryan?

Further suggestions welcome.

Writer's choice 232: Anne Berkeley

Anne Berkeley was born in Ludlow, England. Her father served in the RAF, where postings entailed seven changes of school by the time she was eight. After Oxford, she qualified as a solicitor. With The Joy of Six she has read poetry up and down the country in theatres, art galleries, village halls and back rooms of pubs. She edited Rebecca Elson's acclaimed posthumous collection A Responsibility to Awe and edits the poetry journal Seam. Anne's first full collection The Men from Praga, which chronicles a Cold War childhood, came out from Salt earlier this year. Here she looks at two nursery picture books: Mother Goose: The Old Nursery Rhymes and The Magic Trumpet.

Anne Berkeley on Arthur Rackham's Mother Goose, and The Magic Trumpet by Mary Durack

My battered childhood copy of Arthur Rackham's Mother Goose bears the pencilled price of 1/6d. It must have been bought second hand. In those days we lived far from a library or bookshop. We had no television. Books were expensive, especially illustrated books, and rarely came for me except at Christmas and birthdays. Now that children's books are so plentiful, various and cheap, it is hard to imagine how much they used to be prized. Most people reading this will be immeasurably better off than most people in England back then. My first home did not have mains electricity or drainage. We drew our water from the stream. We lit oil lamps in the evening. When Jack jumped over the candlestick, I knew he was doing a very foolish and dangerous thing.

He probably lived in the same town as Wee Willie Winkie, who ran though the streets in his nightgown crying through the locks; the town 'where boys and girls come out to play, the moon doth shine as bright as day'; the town where 'hark hark, the dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town, some in rags, some in tags, and some in velvet gown'. They might get to Babylon by candlelight, there and back again.

For all the domestic clutter of kettles, clocks, carving knives and pudding-bag strings, I could see that it was not our world in there. Rackham's streets were crooked, houses hunched with secrets. When they were not growing magical fruit, trees were animate with eyes and accusing fingers, and his natural world felt conspiratorial and malign. Some artists - Cézanne, say - change the way we see things but apart from an occasional willow tree Rackham's grotesqueries were a lesson in fiction, safely confined to the book. I wonder now at his dark imagination, suited to the conspiracies and evils that supposedly inspired some of the rhymes. But in those days I wandered freely in the garden looking for cockle shells, and in the woods listening for the wind that might break the baby's bough.

'The wind said: "I warned him!/ Come away from there!" I warned him [...] The wind tells the story/ For he never keeps a secret...' The Magic Trumpet, written by Mary Durack and illustrated by her sister Elizabeth, came from the other side of the world, where my father was born. The first book I remember that comprised a single narrative, it tells in 200 lines of verse the story of a fairy child who becomes mortal, or nearly so. This fairy wasn't a soppy girl with gauzy wings sitting in a flower - I knew they didn't exist - but an Aborigine boy, scandalously naked.

He finds himself a bamboo trumpet down in the swamp and the 'sweet hours passed unheeded [...] while he piped the years away'. The elders having failed to tame him, he escapes to enchant mortal children with his music. The authorities want to put a stop:

"We will take him with the others;
"We will put aside his trumpet;
"We will clothe him like his brothers
"We will tame the wild rhythm
"Of his dusky, dancing feet.
"He must learn the laws of music,
"Though the tunes he plays are sweet."

So they led them from the wild wood
From the magic glades of childhood
To the ordered city highways
And a school house in a street.

It may not be great poetry, but it was full of mystery. Who was the fairy boy 'peeping, creeping over the rim of the world'? Where did he come from? If the wind finds him a mortal mother, does that mean he has a real mother somewhere else? And does he miss her? How could he escape the school the other children went to? Could he fly? Did he die? I knew that real people couldn't fly without aeroplanes, or stay away from school unpunished.

Every word is hand-written in curly block caps, and printed in sepia. The illustrations are swooping and fanciful, the boy's limbs impossibly elongated, his 'slender bamboo trumpet' curved unlike any bamboo I have ever seen. Everything swirls with the spell: Elizabeth Durack reserves the straight line for telegraph poles and city tenements, the 'smoky alleys that never saw the moon'. Away from those who would clothe the rebel and tame his music, the book is alive with Australian flora and fauna. Unlike Rackham's, these creatures are guileless, susceptible to the fairy's gift. He pipes himself across vast and dramatic landscapes, even 'the desert's grim expanse', flocks of birds in his wake. I knew it by heart and longed to go there.

It was through rhyme that I learned to read as I followed my mother's finger, realizing suddenly that words that sounded similar looked similar too. Then I discovered that some of the rhymes in Mother Goose were different from those I'd learned from my mother. My black hen was Heckledy-Speckledy, not Hickety-Pickety. Mother Goose's farmers didn't ride like ours: 'hobbledy-dee, hobbledy-dee, and down into a ditch!' It would be nice to pretend that these discrepancies gave me a precocious wariness of the authority of print.

I was saddened to learn recently that only 36 per cent of UK parents now teach their children nursery rhymes, and dismayed that their favourite is the anodyne 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'. For generations of us, these little aural dramas created neural pathways for a lifetime. Nursery rhymes are supposed to have hidden, political meanings though that seems beside the point. Rhythmically varied, child-sized and mentally portable, they could carry you away.

'Follow, follow where you hear him, for you have not lost him yet'. Back in 1946 The Magic Trumpet must have seemed enlightened. Its fly leaf claims: 'the Durack books are helping to enrich Australian literature and to bring about a genuine understanding of the first people of this land'. The Duracks grew up on a remote station in Western Australia. They befriended Aborigines at a time when others shunned and persecuted them. Controversially, Elizabeth even assumed an Aboriginal identity for some late artwork. The book may seem like settler kitsch, reeking of privilege, but it was a response to the assaults on the Aboriginal way of life. It is impossible to read it now without thinking of the stolen generation. The escapist yearning it evokes is the merest ghost of the ineffable tragedies of wrecked families and devastated indigenous culture.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Soft evidence

In the 'Face to faith' column in Saturday's Guardian, Roger Tagholm marks the 40th anniversary of something called the Religious Experience Research Centre. He quotes an example of the type of communication that the Centre receives, relating a spiritual or religious experience. Here it is:

Vauxhall station on a murky November Saturday evening is not the setting one would choose for a revelation of God... The whole compartment was filled with light. I felt caught up into some tremendous sense of being within a loving, triumphant and shining purpose. All men were shining and glorious beings who in the end would enter incredible joy. In a few moments the glory had departed, all but one curious, lingering feeling. I loved everybody in that compartment. I seemed to sense the golden worth in them all.

The centre, Tagholm says, has 6,000 accounts of this kind, and he adds that they 'form an "evidence" of sorts for some unspecified "other"'. Well, I can't comment on 5,999 of those accounts, but how is this one evidence of an unspecified 'other' in the sense that Tagholm means it? It might simply have come from the perceptions and inner reactions to these of the individual concerned, the person reporting the experience. To that line of thought Tagholm has a ready response. It is, in essence, as follows: sometimes our mental experiences are responses to things that really are out there, as when we see an object; so it could be, too, with religious experiences.

Yes, so I suppose it could be; but so, also, it needn't be. This is a rather soft use of the concept of evidence. It could be that my dreams are copies of events going on in another world, and that that image which I saw was the image of a ghost, or was an extraterrestrial or was a character come to life out of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. But generally we make tougher demands before accepting as evidence for some external reality the idiosyncratic experiences of single individuals, uncorroborated by anyone else in their vicinity. Are the researchers into religious experience really willing to settle for standards of evidence such as would validate a person's claim to have had an encounter with, say, a long-dead ancestor or the Ghost of Christmas Present?

His popularity ignored

You gotta be grateful for Seumas Milne, really you gotta. I mean, his political leanings and judgements may often have you reaching for something to settle your stomach, but every now and again he's good for a laugh. His first three paragraphs reporting an encounter with Noam Chomsky provide a gigglesworth.

Noam who? you ask. Let Seumas enlighten you: 'closest thing in the English-speaking world to an intellectual superstar'; 'towering academic reputation'; 'as good as invented modern linguistics'; 'entertained by presidents'; 'addresses the UN general assembly'; 'commands a mass international audience'; has 'thousands of young people battl[ing] for tickets to attend his lectures'; is 'mobbed by students as a celebrity'; is 'followed live on the internet across the globe'.

Yodel me a yak-song, is that all? Doesn't he also have a choir of Guardianista angels singing his praises even unto the fourteenth day of the last reunion of the trembling tulip-swappers?

But but but this great man, so rated and so fêted, has to labour under the handicap that:

... the bulk of the mainstream western media doesn't seem to have noticed... he is rarely reported or interviewed in the US outside radical journals and websites.

He has been repaid (would you believe it?) with 'silence'; 'Chomsky and his genuine popularity are ignored'.

Don't you just love it? Popular but not popular enough. His very popularity should be popular - no, should be more popular. It should be popular also with those with whom it isn't popular. There should be universal Chomsky-popularity - call it Chomskularity. Commentators like Oliver Kamm, with whom Chomsky is not so popular, with whom, indeed, Pop Noam is anything but Chomskular, should be keel-hauled and derided to the tiniest hair on their bonces. It is a scandal and abomination that this tower of wisdom, this celebrity celebrated throughout the world, should be so overlooked and marginalized, his popularity so underrated and unbuilt upon.