Category: Op-ed essay

Listening to Lord Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’ podcast on Colette (1873-1954) the other day brought to mind Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).  

How so?  

Bragg’s panel members were absolutely determined to read into Colette’s wondrous prose all manner of weighty and sharp points about gender, equality, class, history, power, and more.  When Colette wrote her sinuous and sparkling prose about sunflowers in a field, according to the savants, she was subtly undermine the patriarchy or denouncing it.  When she wrote charming vignettes about Claudine’s schoolgirl crushes on the film stars, she was subtly attacking social class.  And so for the prescribed 45 minutes, but this time I did not exercise the option of listing to the bonus five minutes afterward, so tedious and tendentious did I find the recitation.  

When I thought about it later, Kundera came to mind.  As for the heavy-weights in Kundera’s novel, so for the Colette panelists, only meaning has any value at all. If Colette wrote about flowers because she liked doing it, was good at doing it, and found it satisfying as an end in itself, it does not have meaning at all to these scholars. They united in denouncing her most effervescent novel, Gigi (1944) categorically and repeatedly, including gratuitous ad hominem asides.  

It seemed to me as I listened, and it seems to me now in hindsight that the panelists were pursing their own agendas and not Colette’s.  That she wrote Gigi in German occupied Paris, living in constant fear that her Jewish husband would be arrested….  That did not enter into the discussion.  The lightness of Gigi was much needed when she produced it. That is remarkable.  

Before and during the war she published life-style articles and some stories in publications that were anti-Semitic, pro-German, collaborationist, and Vichy.  Again our panelists were silent. I expect she did so to eke out a living in hard times and from 1940 there were no other choices.  All that seemed much more important in her life than their abstractions about gender, class, patriarchy, capitalism, and other way stations on the tenure-track. Survival.  And to survive she looked to light side, the bright side.  

Nor was much said about her short but noteworthy career as a journalist of which she once said, in a lesson few journalists these days heed, ‘you have to see and not invent, you have to touch and not imagine…’  (By the way, she reported crime – robbery, rape, and murder – for a Paris scandal sheet, not flower shows.)

I read a long biographical introduction to a volume of her memorable short stories years ago, and cannot identify it today, but some of it stuck with me.  

Edward Tufte,‘The Cognitive Style of Power Point,’ page 156-185.

This is a chapter in his marvellous book Beautiful Evidence (2006) which ought to be mandatory study in business, engineering, economics, political science and much else.  

In this chapter Tufte eviscerates those who practice McKinsey management by Power Point. There are some humdingers.  One is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address reduced to Power Point KPIs. Thus drained of meaning, no would ever remember it.  Follow the link below.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-gettysburg-address-as-a-powerpoint/281636/

Likewise is the painstaking argument that NASA disasters have occurred partly because of the superficial decision-making using Power Point.  Gulp!  It is not just the low-bid contractors but the absence of specification, documentation, and clarification, favouring instead hierarchical bullet points and discussion.  Technical papers are boring compared to the light show!  When post-disaster inquiries asked for the technical studies from which the presentation Power Points were derived, they discovered there were no technical documents.  Just the PP slides derived from — wait for it — discussions. Now that is engineering!  Not!  Maybe that is how low-bid contractors keep the price down, saving on printing costs. (We all know how expensive toner cartridges are.) 

The curse of McKinsey is not just limited to Power Point, as Tufte shows. When at launch the heat shield problem was detected NASA officials decline to ask the US Air Force to turn one of its spy satellites on the space shuttle to get a look at the hole. Why? Because it  would have compromised the KPIs of the management team’s advancement to promotion.  Rather than find out right away how serious the problem was, the managers decided it was not serious enough to risk personal promotion. Eight astronauts died in that crash. 

Remember that O-ring?  I do.  He is even more direct in the piece linked below.

https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/HO_SNOW_2014_PowerPoint-Is-Evil.pdf

Dare we conclude similar light shows are the basis for other, military decisions, too.  Probably, but these are only on the public record in Arlington. How Robert McNamara would have loved Power Point. Bad decisions, bad planes made efficiently!  

In politics, we know that the Blair governments in Great Britain operated by discussion with the attendant vagaries, having nothing in writing that could be leaked or revealed through Freedom of Information requests now or ever. No doubt this approach explains much.     

OP-ed

Whenever I learn of another rant on hate radio 2GB I pause.  The ‘GB’ in the name comes from the initials of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who inspired the founders of the station in 1926.  This fact is absent from both the station’s current website and its Wikipedia entry.

Bruno championed science, fact, religious toleration, freedoms for women. He ridiculed corrupt authority in the Vatican as a giant Ponzi scheme. He could never ingratiate himself with established authority in universities.  Not enough nationally competitive grants. He was also a scientific peer of Galileo.  

He was pursued by the Inquisition across Europe until, exhausted, he finally succumbed for refusing to compromise the truth of scientific fact for the ideology of the Roman Church, just as Socrates did for refusing to pander to the idiocracy. The shock jocks of the age rejoiced as Bruno was burned at the stake as they had done when Socrates was poisoned. Hollow triumphs for the shock jocks, because their names are forgotten while those of Socrates and Bruno live on. Obscurity likewise awaits all of today’s the kings of hate.

Though hate radio has a large following, no doubt it’s practitioners view these followers with contempt. See A Face in the Crowd (1957) with Andy Griffith for the illustration. Or check out Jimmy ‘Drink the Kool-Aid’ Jones.  

Of late there have been  a few intemperate remarks about Australian foreign aid in the context of the continental fires.  As usual with followers of Pox News, the facts are lost in the red haze of outrage.  

Still the facts do count.

1. Australia’s foreign aid is about half per capita that of the UK.  That is, it is not generous. In turn, the UK per capita amount is about half that of Sweden per capita.  
2. Nor is it a free gift.  Nearly all the aid is invested in projects (clean water, sanitation, roads, ports, schools, hospitals, training) the materials for which are purchased in Australia.  The water purification plants are bought from Australian suppliers.  The nurses training is delivered by Australian schools.  That is, the money is spent in Strine.  
3. In building projects, Australian firms are the preferred contractors, and secure the bulk of the business.  
4. The vast majority of the aid money is invested near Australia, e.g., the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Timor, Tonga, Nauru, and the like. The strategy is to make a buffer from the increasing Chinese influence in the South Pacific.  The aim is to make lasting friends with the neighbours and to strengthen them to resist Chinese blandishments. (Look it up.) I taught a number of students from these parts whose education in Australia was made possible by Aid projects.  In that sense, part of my salary came from the Aid budget.   
5. At no time are suitcases of dollars handed over contra Pox News.  

All of this and more can be gleaned from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade web site in five or ten minutes.  Of course, that is too taxing for a Pox journalist.  

The Solomon Islands, Timor, Tonga, Nauru and the like are in no position to come to Australia’s assistance in the fire crisis.  Pay a visit to one of these places to see why.  

Yes, the paper total is four billion sunbaked Strine dollars, but few of those bucks leave the country.  Moreover, to put that total in perspective the twelve-kilometre tram line I took today back from the blood bank today cost over one billion of those self-same dollars.  That makes it comparable to the sports stadia that state governments continue to build for football games most of us will never see.  The total cost of WestConnex, should it ever be completed, will probably dwarf the annual foreign aid budget as it moves Sydney traffic jams from one place to another.  

One cannot escape the feeling that part of the repeated and ritualistic outrage of the Poxes at foreign aid is racist.  We are giving our white dosh to darkies!       

In his Outline of History (1920) H. G Wells wrote that ‘Civilisation is in a race between education and catastrophe.’* 

Catastrophe is winning. 

After one hundred and fifty years of free public education, the Enlightenment project seems to be spent.  Instead of reason and evidence, even ostensibly educated people celebrate, parade, and worship passion. Emotions are regarded as superior to reason.  Thus I have oft heard that it is praise to say a scientist is passionate, whereas I would prefer a scientist to be cool and detached, letting the facts and evidence lead to the conclusions, not the emotions. Ditto for journalists, doctors, teachers, and ambulance drivers and more. But no, they are congratulated for passion not competence, discipline, restraint, diligence, tenacity, skepticism, preparation, endurance, and the like.  

To say someone is competent, knowledgeable, effective, precise, industrious, or professional is faint praise compared to attributing passion.  

Indeed the self-advertising of universities follows the crowd, touting passion not perfection, belief not doubt in proclaiming their virtues.  

Emotional reactions are simple, binary, as when cheering on a sporting team. These days even the self-appointed newspapers of record, having forsaken the historic mission of public edification, put sports figures and celebrities on the front page in the vein attempt to hook buyers and readers by passions, not by information, insight, knowledge, or long and slowly accumulated intelligence that came from sitting still and reading or patiently listening.  Favoured instead is the direct intuition of passion. 

Press that button!  

Admittedly education itself has changed in that century and a half.  In the last two generations in a comfort born of the sacrifices of others, the denizens of higher education have largely devoted themselves to undermining the Enlightenment project, while enjoying its benefits, and they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and passed that on to their students who have gone on to become school teachers, parents, journalists, and community leaders. Witness the world they have made today in Whitehall and the White House where volume and repetition have replaced facts and evidence. Passionately saying it is so now makes it so. 

Intellectuals were the first to find facts irrelevant and spread the word in seminars, lectures, and books. The word has spread and now grows of itself. Truth is no longer privileged. This I have been told for years in seminars, conferences, and theses. All knowledge is tainted.  Everything is opinion.  (See Plato’s Republic Book Ten.)

*If some smartypants out there could supply the volume and page numbers I will thank them personally.