climate change policy, science, and activism; photography; cartography and mapmaking
Discussion of books and other literature
Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.
Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. p. 3 (hardcover)
My copy of Randall Monroe’s What if? book arrived from Amazon today, and I spent a pleasant couple of hours in the Upper Library going through it. Right from the disclaimer it is quite entertaining:
The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.
Toronto friends are welcome to borrow the book and learn about bullet-sized pieces of material with neutron star density; the effects of draining Earth’s oceans; the plausibility of eradicating the common cold through global quarantine; and similarly practical matters.
But here’s the point. He had made another choice too. He had decided to cast himself as the victim, the wronged, the deceived, the rightly furious. He had persuaded himself that he had said nothing to me about the laundry basket. The memory had been erased, and for a purpose. But now he didn’t even know he’d erased it. He wasn’t even pretending. He actually believed in his disappointment. He really did think that I had done something devious and mean. He was protecting himself from the idea that he’d had a choice. Weak, self-deluding, pompous? All those, but above all, a failure of reasoning. High table, monographs, government commissions – meaningless. His reasoning had deserted him. As I saw it, Professor Canning was suffering from a gross intellectual malfunction.
McEwan, Ian. Sweet Tooth. 2012. p. 31 (emphasis in original)
Related: Self Deception
A friend of mine recently lent me Kevin Mitnick‘s book Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker. It’s an entertaining story that highlights how the willingness of people to trust and help others who they assume to be co-workers is often the greatest weakness in security systems.
It also highlights some of the characteristics of obsessive behaviour. I had no idea how many separate times Mitnick was caught. It reminded me of Marc Lewis’ Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, in terms of how repeated contact with agents of authority was insufficient to interrupt a longstanding pattern of behaviour.
The book is also a reminder of what seems like a more innocent era of global interconnectivity – when phone phreaks with blue boxes were a cutting-edge threat, and when the FBI would have real trouble tracking you down if you assumed the identity of someone who died in childhood. Now, attacks against computer systems seem associated more with governments themselves than with curious amateurs, and it’s difficult to imagine someone like Mitnick evading the surveillance state for long.
Trapped in a science fiction book store by a short spring downpour, I bought a copy of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. After hearing him much recommended, this is the first thing of his I’ve read. I’m enjoying the language and style of storytelling, and the similarities the premise bears to Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently books is interesting – antiquated gods existing unnoticed, having been deprived of followers by history.
There are rarely long passages that seem especially quotable, but there are lots of little fragments I like:
‘Caracoled’ is also an interesting verb.
Recent work by Gunther and Schmitt (2004) on the hostile media effect offers a partial clarification of our findings. These authors conducted an experiment in which a purposefully crafted neutral text was presented to experts involved in the ongoing controversy over genetically modified organisms. For one randomized group of experts, this text was presented as a news item; for the other, the identical text was presented as a research paper from a senior undergraduate student. In comparing participants’ evaluations of bias in the text, Gunther and Schmitt found striking differences. Whereas the presentation of the text as a news item yielded extreme and contradictory assessments of bias, the identical text presented as an undergraduate research paper was generally judged to be balanced. The authors argue that this reflects the importance of experts’ “imagination of audience” as a critical factor in their understanding of texts and communications. In this sense, experts are reacting against the media based on their understanding of the competency and vulnerability of the general public: “Partisans may believe that information in a mass medium will reach a large audience of neutral, and perhaps more vulnerable, readers – readers who could be convinced by unbalanced or misleading information to support the ‘wrong’ side.” In short, Gunther and Schmitt’s research suggests that negative views of the media related more directly to experts’ views of the general public than to the behaviours of media institutions themselves.
Young, Nathan and Ralph Matthews. The Aquaculture Controversy in Canada: Activism, Policy, and Contested Science. 2010. p. 149 (paperback)
Much of this seems applicable to the movement to keep climate change under control by shifting away from fossil fuels:
Any serious answer, to borrow the well-known phrase from William Faulkner that then-Senator Obama used in his remarkable speech on race during his 2008 campaign for the presidency, must begin with the recognition that “the past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past.” On that view, abolition may be regarded not as a passing episode but as a movement that crystallized – or, as we might say today, channeled – an energy that has been at work in our culture since the beginning and is likely to express itself again in variant forms in the future. If, in fact, there is such a current in American life, surely we want to know why it is sometimes active and sometimes dormant, and why – improbable as it seems to us today – some people of good will and liberal sentiments have resisted it. To ask these sorts of questions is, I think, to broaden our inquiry beyond the kind of documentary texts on which I have so far relied and to include works generally assigned to the category of literature. It is to construe abolitionism not only as a historically specific movement but as an ahistorical category of human will and sentiment – of what we might even dare to call human nature. It is to suggest that we have not seen the last of it, and probably never will.
In this broader view, an abolitionist is not a member of this or that party but is someone who identifies a heinous evil and wants to eradicate it – not tomorrow, not next year, but now. Prince Hamlet of Denmark, who sees “time… out of joint” and believes himself “born to set it right” is an abolitionist – albeit a reluctant one. Don Quixote, who tells Sancho Panza that he was “born in this age of iron” with a duty to restore “the age of gold”, is an abolitionist. Karilov in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed (also translated as The Devils), who is prepared to commit suicide to usher in the millennium, is an abolitionist. Indeed every millenarian dreamer who has ever longed for the fire in which sin and sinners are consumed is an abolitionist – and sometimes the purification will include his own self-immolation. (Andrew Delbanco, p. 22-23 hardcover)
…
Perhaps it is not true that “sacred rage” may have been a hindrance to abolitionism after a while. Nothing gets started without the rebels. They are the ones who light the way for others through the illumination of their transcendent feelings. What courage was needed to oppose a system sanctioned by the Bible and seemingly confirmed by history as being permanent. That is why abolitionists, black and white, will continue to speak down through the ages, in some place like China, which badly needs another revolution and the example of the abolitionists. Maybe somewhere a young Chinese person, a twenty-first century leader, is encountering the story of Frederick Douglass. Good news, chariot’s coming, old blacks used to say. (Darryl Pinckney, p. 132-3)
…
The problem is perhaps accentuated by the fact that the abolitionist style, by definition, tends to emphasize overarching legal and structural change rather than a highly particular and gradual process of cultural amelioration. Its chief focus was on abolition of the institution of slavery and all its legal and moral supports, not the manumission and uplift of individual slaves, let alone their economic or social empowerment. This approach to reform has the advantage of being bold and comprehensive, buoyed by a sense of crystalline moral clarity. It has the deficiency of being abstract and narrow, tending toward formalism, most concerned with the category of victimhood than the conditions of actual victims, deaf to the thousand complexities of actual human circumstances, and susceptible to the prophetic urge to say, in the accents of Max Weber’s ethic of ultimate ends: “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall!” It is, to use the jargon of moral philosophy, apodictic and deontic rather than empirical and consequentialist. (Wilfred M. McClay p. 141-2)
Delbanco, Andrew. The Abolitionist Imagination. Harvard University Press. 2012.
Related: Daniel Carpenter and Andrew Delbanco on abolitionism
The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves. And there are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. And when you tell them to stop, they don’t hear you.
So there is only one thing left to do. Either most of them must be cleared away while there is still an earth, with trees and flowers and birds and fish and so on, or all must die when there are none of those things left. Because if there are none of those things left, then there will be nothing at all. Not even any people.
So shouldn’t you give those ones a second chance? he asked himself. No, he answered, because they have had a second chance. They have had many second chances. Now is the time.
Atwood, Margaret. MaddAddam. 2013. p. 291 (hardcover)
The year is off to a rapidfire start.
As part of the PhD, I need to do a second core seminar this year. I have chosen to take public policy because it accords well with my interests and experience, and apparently has a less onerous reading load than either comparative politics or international relations. I have been advised against taking courses with excessive reading requirements, given the need to re-take my Canadian politics comp in December.
PhD students are expected to take two courses in each term, so I am also taking an environmental politics and policy course. In addition, I am working as a teaching assistant for a course in U.S. government and politics, with three seminars back to back on Thursdays.
At our termly general meeting on the 25th, I will not be running for re-election to the executive of Toronto350.org. Nevertheless, I have some obligations to discharge with them, including two on-campus workshops on divestment and the October 15th film screening (free tickets still available).
In the background at all times, I should be thinking about and preparing for my re-comp in December. I find that I have already forgotten a lot of what I crammed for it the first time. When I re-take it, I will need to demonstrate both a comprehensive knowledge of the literature and an ability to formulate complex and convincing arguments. Toward the latter objective, I should be building up a database of convincing (and conventional, I’ve been warned off controversy) answers to recent comp questions.
Donald Savoie’s 1999 book is the single-best account I have read of the functioning of Canada’s federal government. It focuses on the growth of the strength of ‘the centre’ of government over the previous thirty years, meaning the prime minister, Prime Minister’s Office, Privy Council Office, Department of Finance, and Treasury Board Secretariat. It discusses every important actor in Canada’s federal government, with specific attention paid to the prime minister, cabinet, deputy ministers, the Clerk of the Privy Council, line departments, the Public Service Commission, and so on.
The overwhelming message is about the new dominance of the Prime Minister: over cabinet colleagues, the central agencies, and over parliament itself, which Savoie argues has a diminished capacity to hold the government to account. Savoie devotes considerable attention to the internal structures and machinery of the civil service, as well as the incentives experienced by individuals within it.
I strongly recommend the book for civil servants (especially those who deal with the central agencies or aspire to join them) and for anyone with a strong interest in how Canada’s government functions.