July 2005 Archives

An essay - Gone Fishing - by Scott McLemee appeared in the online version of Inside Higher Education last week. The title plays on the name and status of Stanley Fish, celebrity public intellectual.

The essay and the Wikipedia entry both mention Fish's ideas about reader-response theory and the interpretive community, and the ambiguity of Fish's relationship to literary and social theories of deconstruction.

Some of Fish's ideas are almost self-evidently true. Literary works are complex sets of words organized to communicate meaning through complex symbols. A literary text contains a narrative description of real or realistic events as imagined by the writer, presenting meaning within a story of people in conflict, the imagined psychology of the characters, and layers of imagery and metaphor. The reader's response to the story depends on the reader's way of unpacking the story. Readers will differ with one another and with the writer over the meaning of words and events, partly because language is a cultural endeavor, inherently imprecise across place and time.

Fish's suggestion that judges, or judges and lawyers are a privileged community seems to describe part of the legal process very well. The law of a place or a people is made up of words pronounced by authoritative persons - rulemakers accepted within the prevailing culture as sovereign authorities. Lawyers and judges spend a great deal of time and energy quarrelling about the words used in Constitutions, statutes, contracts and judicial opinions, in a theoretical effort to reach a principled, rational understanding. In common practice actual cases are decided by the instinctive or intuitive sense of justice of the judges hearing the case, as conditioned by the values of their interpretive community.

Theodore Dalrymple's essay In the Asylum in the summer 2005 issue of City Journal is worth reading. It caught my attention because I have spent a fair amount of time on law and social policy around mental health. Dalrymple was a forensic psychiatrist, and his essay demonstates the professional frustration of the medical psychiatry with human rights laws that restrict that profession's ability to intervene. He discusses one incident where he obviously thought it best, on behalf of prison authorities, to sedate and treat a psychotic inmate.

His essay is informative but polemical. In Canada, the law permits intervention to treat a patient who lacks capacity to make informed decisions. The focus is on the patient's capacity, and not on whether the patient's decisions correspond to a psychiatrist's assessment of what is a patient's best interests. For the curious, a link to the 2003 judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in Starson v. Swayze.

His dissection of the ideas of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault is adept. I agree with his criticisms of R.D. Laing, whose views were naive, romantic, unscientific and unrealistic. I agree with some his criticisms of Foucault, but I think he has largely failed to deal with the substance of Foucault's argument. He tries to undermine Foucault with ad hominem arguments - bashing him as gay French intellectual doesn't help to identify or answer Foucault's critique of therapeutic justice. Foucault made sound points about the loss of dignity inherent in an institutional life and power struggles between patients and care givers. Foucault pointed out that the rhetoric of helping patients obscures the fact that society intervenes to protect itself, and that human dignity is sacrificed in the quest to make the mentally ill safely invisible.

An update on the stories mentioned in my entry on Pluralism, Dutch Style.

The Dutch Courts have convicted the murderer of Theo Van Gogh. The BBC reported that Mohammed Bouyeri, who has joint Dutch-Moroccan nationality, was convicted of murder. Another BBC report on the public reactions to the case in Holland mentioned that he is going to be charged with terrorist conspiracy offences.

There are difficult aspects to this story. Bouyeri was a disaffected immigrant youth, apparently involved with drug use and street crime. He found new values in fundamentalist Islam, which made helped him live within a strict moral code, connected him to his cultural roots, and gave him a supportive community. It also indoctrinated him in an ideology of moral and cultural superiority and empowered him to become a terrorist and a murderer.

Wikipedia has an entry on New Age, and uses "New Age" as a category container for related entries.

Wikipedia entries evolve. The main entry seems to have started in December 2001. The current version deals with the New Age, both as a social event and as a set of ideas, in an accurate and descriptive way, catching the main social, economic, ideological and psychological features of the New Age event. Some of the Wikipedia entries within the New Age category are fragmentary, and some of them tend to promote particular New Age systems. The entry on neuro-linguistic programming as presently written, tends to promote a movement that has much in common with Scientology. The entries miss a lot, which is natural. The New Age is an amorphous, fluid movement. Some of the omissions are large. The book stores and Web pages presently are pushing a lot of words about about Energy and Intention. Wikipedia presently only has a stub entry on Spiritual Energy. It has a good page on Intentionality as a branch of the philosophy of mind, but only a stub page on New Age guru of the Power of Intentions, Wayne Dyer.

The Wikipedia steps gently around issues of character and temperament. New Agers try to project an air of detachment, but they protect themselves and the sense of satisfaction they get from their beliefs, practics and associations by avoiding scrutiny and debate, and by promoting beliefs that blame and criticize their critics. The New Age has a smorgasboard (or should I say a dim sum menu) of beliefs and values to insulate New Age believers from conflicting beliefs and values. I noticed an entry on Energy Vampires. I also noticed an entry on Personal Reality - the perfect marriage of New Age beliefs with one stream of postmodern theory.

It hasn't been a good summer for bike rides. Through most of June and early July, it has rained on Sunday. Some weekends we have managed to ride on Saturday afternoon or managed a shorter ride in the 35 k range on Sunday, but we have missed our longer rides. We did a metric century past St. Francis on Canada Day. Mike and I rode to St. Adolphe with Clint on a muggy hot Sunday morning July 10. We finally had a dry day and Mike, Steve and I rode to Lockport yesterday (Sunday July 24).

We have managed to get 2 or 3 evening rides during the week, and we are pushing those into the 35-40 k range, so we are actually getting decent distances and maintaining our fitness, slowly improving our peak and average speeds, riding longer and faster into adverse winds.

I have been concentrating on small adjustments. I change the cleat position in my shoe, raise or lower the seat by half a centimeter. Yesterday I changed the alignment of the seat and the seat angle on my road bike during the ride, and when I was finished I changed the position of the brake levers for a better riding position when I ride with my hands over the levers - a good position for harder riding without going down on the drops. I have been learning what feels right, checking against stress and joint pain, changing things when knees or hips hurt. So far, so good.

My blogging has slowed down this summer. I have been spending more time cycling and reading, and less time at the keyboard.

The spam situation has improved. There hasn't been any spam on the blog for a long time. What I mean is that is that the spam attempts also seem to have dropped off. The maintenance on the spam logs was not time consuming, but it was annoying. I run MT Blacklist without getting Blacklist updates. I culled the list to a few dozen strings and a couple of dozen patterns. For a while, the log showed I was getting hits, but it seems to have dried up a few weeks ago. I also run Spamlookup and Keystroke which take care of everything that Blacklist doesn't block. I think a lot of spam was probably coming from a few sources and they may have just taken me off their lists when they couldn't get a hit.

Movable Type is beta testing MT 3.2. I am going to wait until they have a stable commercial release, tested to work with the plugins that I use, and then upgrade. I don't want to move to another platform unless another platform offers clear advantages.

The first season of Slings and Arrows, 6 episodes produced in 2003, was played repeatedly - mainly on Showcase I think - last winter and spring, and a second season has started on Movie Central in Canada. I think the fourth episode airs tonight.

The Doubter's Companion (1994, ISBN 0-670-85536-7) followed Voltaire's Bastards in Canadian writer John Ralston Saul's books on modern economics, politics and culture. His Wikipedia entry identifies him as a philosopher. I see him as a public intellectual and a social critic. His academic background appears to have been in economics. His arguments blend careful analysis with colourful and forceful presentation.

This book is subtitled "a dictionary of aggressive common sense", which plays out as an alphabetically organized collection of essays running from a few lines to a few pages. His essays explore concerns that are discussed in more detail in several of his other books.

A few weeks ago I read Letters to a Young Contrarian (ISBN 0-465-03033-5) by Christopher Hitchens. The book is part of a series published by Basic Books called "The Art of Mentoring". Hitchens has made his career as a journalist, literary critic, political commentator and public intellectual. The pieces in Letters to a Young Contrarian are gems - finely crafted essays on living the examined life in public.

Neat. The English online version of a Turkish paper has a interview with James W. Bernauer, the American author of several books on the French philosopher Michel Foucault, tied in to the publication of a Turkish translation of one of his books. Bernauer teaches at Boston College and many of his books and papers identify him as James w. Bernauer S.J. which indicates that he is a member of the Jesuits, and therefore a Catholic scholar.

Bernauer says that Foucault's later writings looked at philosophy as a method of care for the self and spirituality as a method of resisting the ideology of power imposed over individuals by society.

Another good article reached through ALDaily. It's about happiness, published in the Times Literary Supplement, a package of three reviews of books about happiness. The author is a social psychologist who has written her own books on happiness. Unfortunately, the non-subscription TLS site only provides part of the article.

Like my post last week "Happy Now" it relates to Positive Psychology, Flow, and other ideas I have tried to unpack.

Winnipeg Folk Festival, Sunday July 10, 2005. Another hot sunny day, carrying a forecast of possible severe thunderstorms. The storms seemed to arrive around 9:45 PM with strong winds, sending the mainstage crowd surging for the exits. The wind died down, we had some light showers, and made it through the rest of the evening. Many of the patrons who had retired to the campground came back. The crowd was smaller, probably only a couple of thousand people stayed to the end. It started to rain after midnight.

Winnipeg Folk Festival, Bird's Hill Park, Saturday July 9. There isn't much to report. It was a sunny windy day, 32 degrees, humidex in the 40's. I stayed home, visited my parents, shopped, cut the grass because it wasn't raining and I was mainly in the shade, and didn't visit the Festival until after 8:00 PM. I didn't go backstage. I saw that the entrance path across Snowberry Field had dried up at one end, where the asphalt ends as the trail emerges onto the field, but there was still a bog where the trail goes into trees again. There was a lot of mud and standing water on the path towards Shady Grove and the backstage.

By the time I left for the site, the forecast had shifted to include a chance of a severe thunderstorm. When I got home this morning, I checked the radar again. There were storms that seemed to form over the corner of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and North Dakota and track northeast over the lakes, missing Winnipeg and Bird's Hill. So far Sunday has been hot, cloudy and windy but the rain has stayed away.

I spent my free time at the Bur Oak stage, reading and then went on shift at Site West. There was still standing water in spots around the Bluestem stage, but it had dried out a lot. There was mud in the record tent and the family tent.

I spent my shift around the Firefly Palace which is the nighttime use of the family entertainment stage. During the day there are games, including hula hoops, juggling with clubs and plates, frisbees, soccer balls etc. The Family area crew had stored gear under a tarp but the evening patrons had hula hoops and juggling articles and were using them. There were some steel pegs in the field to secure some log stumps. I don't know the daytime use but the logs and spikes were hazards in the dark. Fence-jumpers, damages fences drunks, lost kids/parents (usually can't navigate back from the port-a-potties in the dark. Lots of activity, not boring. One of the shows was music played by a VJ against a Bollywood film for a video dance party.

Didn't hear any other music, had a good time.

Friday July 8, 2005. Weather, site, a little music, mainly a rant about the way Festival management deals with the site.

Thursday July 7, 2005, Winnipeg Folk Festival. My report on weather, site, music and whatever else I want to blog about.

The Winnipeg Folk Festival starts today. I am again a volunteer on the Site Security crew. I have gone to the orientation meeting and to the T-Shirt evening. I have my pass and my schedule.

The Festival has become a personal event, perhaps a ritual of summer for me and for the majority of fans. It is a multi-layered event, bringing people into contact for a few days. I have come to believe that the music has become subordinate to the event - there is certainly none of the silence and reverent focus on the performer and the music that is found in concert settings.

The weather appears to be very good, generally sunny and hot, although the forecast for today includes possible thundershowers.

The site is soggy. Southern Manitoba has been pounded by rain and heavy rain last Wednesday basically led to huge surface flooding in many areas, as the saturated ground refused to take and more, and drainages were overwhelmed. The Festival site in Bird's Hill Park is high and dry, on a sandy esker but the silty clay topsoil that holds down the grass on the festival site has been saturated. In other years, I have seen it turn to gumbo after a half hour of rain, but dry in a day.

I haven't paid a lot of attention to the line-up; I trust that I will be entertained, and I look forward to some moments of joy and insight.

Yesterday, in a happy coincidence, I read an article in Spiked magazine and the entry on happiness in John Ralston's Saul's The Doubter's Companion.

Saul argued that the meaning of happiness has slipped, and that in modern times we tend to look for the wrong kind of happiness in the wrong places. In Aristotle's ethics, happiness meant human harmony, and ethical actions were actions that produced that kind of happiness. In modern liberal discourse, happiness means basic material comfort in a prosperous well-organized society. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that Americans had a natural right to pursuit of happiness, he meant the right to work for their own prosperity and to work collectively for that kind of society. When we say that politicians have a responsibility to promote happiness in that sense, we mean to promote laws and policies that promote a prosperous well-organized society.

Happiness has another meaning. Saul suggests that as Western society achieved the goals of prosperity and organization, "the word's meaning declined into the pursuit of pleasure or an obscure sense of inner contentment". He cites a comment attributed to the late French president Charles DeGaulle - "happiness is for idiots". He unpacks this as describing the fact that the political and economic processes of Western society are losing their focus. Those processes should be aimed at maintaining prosperity and well-being, not contentment. People are coming to expect the rest of the world to make them feel good and blaming "society" and life for being uncertain, risky and messy.

A comprehensive historical and literary review of the work of Patrick O'Brien - the Aubrey and Maturin novels in the New Criterion by Robert Messenger. O'Brien is one of my favourite writers. This review emphasizes some of the history. I like the novels in which Maturin has the chance to act on his interests as naturalist and explorer. That part of the series was captured in some scenes in the movie version of Master and Commander, The Far Side of the World (which are two separate books in the series, merged into one movie).