Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a classic spy novel, written for those who enjoy the suggestion of authenticity. Rather than indulging in the over-the-top pyrotechnics found in some spy thrillers, Le Carré’s characters are cautious and meticulous. In particular, the protagonist George Smiley is a kind of antithesis to the James Bond stereotype: fat, clad in fogged spectacles, burdened with an unfaithful wife, but nonetheless at the top of the game when it comes to counterintelligence operations in the United Kingdom.

The setting – Britain during the Cold War – permeates the book. I will admit that it is a bit amusing to read about the high drama of spies speeding along obscure motorways connecting small British cities, rather than jetting around between glamorous national capitals. At the same time, Le Carré does capture what I would expect to be the key geopolitical dynamics of the time: the superpower competition between Russia and America, with the United Kingdom in the middle in a diminished post-imperial role. Le Carré talks about how British agents were: “Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away.” It makes you wonder who will be elevated and who will be lowered, forty years from now.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy includes some observations that border on the philosophical. Le Carré raises the question of oversight, and the difficulty of trusting spies (p. 74 paperback) ; he explains how the wily opponent seeks not perfection, but advantage from his actions (194) ; the ways in which the false identities a person maintains actually express the person they conceal (213); how intelligence services have an incentive to puff up the competence of their opponents, to get more support for themselves (316); how “survival” is “an infinite capacity for suspicion” (337); how the essence of betrayal is to “overtly pursue… one aim and secretly achieve its opposite” (354); how a state’s secret services provide a measure of its political health (365); and how treason becomes “a matter of habit” once initial motivations become fuzzy and continuing on the same course seems the simplest option (377). The comment about enemy capabilities is especially relevant today, as gigantic state security bureaucracies justify themselves on the basis of the threat from a few dangerous malcontents hanging around in caves and radical discussion forums online.

Le Carré’s writing is full of examples of clever observation, which both appeals to the reader’s curiosity and makes the characters themselves seem more interesting and authentic. The book is also peppered with authentic-seeming espionage tradecraft, in areas like following people, transmitting information securely, sending coded signals, and handling in-person meetings. Probably technology has changed some of that since 1974, but perhaps not all that much. The paranoid world of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in which it is unclear which of the authorities can be trusted, has many parallels with the world today.

Fountain pens

Earlier, I wrote a mini review of an inexpensive Pelikan fountain pen. It also seems worth commenting on the pen type generally.

The two principal virtues of fountain pens seem to be that it takes very little pressure to write with them – which eases the task of writing for hours on end – and that it is a fun novelty to write with an unusual implement.

Those virtues being recognized, there are also good reasons why fountain pens are no longer prevalent. At least when it comes to the inexpensive ones I have used, it can be hard to start writing with one when it has been left alone for a day or two (much less for a week or two). Getting the ink flowing often involves the messy business of spinning the pen like a centrifuge to drive ink down through the nib. Similarly, fountain pens experience issues with the flow of ink being randomly interrupted while writing, which is especially annoying when you are trying to jot something down quickly. Avoiding this requires that you clean the nib regularly, which is messy and a bit annoying, since you need to write with extra-watery ink for a good while after you clean it out.

Fountain pen cartridges run out of ink much more quickly than your standard ballpoint / rollerball / gel ink cartridges, and are messier and more difficult to replace.

In short, there are many inconveniences that seem to be associated with fountain pen use. They may be less of an issue for very expensive pens, but I am hardly going to spend hundreds of dollars to find out. Fountain pens can be fun to use from time to time – and are genuinely useful for circumstances like three hour essay exams – but I doubt they should be replacing anybody’s favourite modern pen options for ordinary day-to-day uses.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Ordinarily, the multi-generational family story is my least favourite kind of novel. I usually find them tedious and uncompelling. It speaks especially well of Junot Diaz’s book, then, that I found it engagingly written and worthwhile, though a rather darker read than I was expecting.

Diaz succeeds in giving distinct voices to his multiple narrators, though it wouldn’t have hurt to identify them at the beginning of each section. The book is also full of poignant and clever descriptions, though they may be a bit crass for some tastes. Diaz’s writing includes many untranslated Spanish passages, some of which at least provide hints of meaning to speakers of English and French, while some of which are simply incomprehensible without assistance. It also includes numerous references to science fiction and fantasy books, which are a passion of the novel’s titular figure.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book is the way in which it effectively expresses the experience of living in a dictatorship that is also a police state: the arbitrary arrests, the inconsistent application of justice, the torture, the rapes, the fear, the spying between neighbours, the absurdity, and the inevitable abuse of power by the secret police. Diaz is very effective at conveying an impression (I cannot judge how accurate) of what the Dominican Republic was like under Rafael Trujillo, the man who looms over the book but whose assassination is relegated to a long footnote.

Reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao could serve as a bit of a vaccine for those who are frustrated by the imperfections of democracy and who wonder whether a benevolent despot might do better. With visceral language that makes for anxious reading, Diaz expresses the injustices that arise when power exists without oversight.

Flex your rights: anonymity

Being able to speak anonymously on the internet is an important right, in this age of increasingly constant surveillance. Because of organizations like the NSA, GCHQ, and Canada’s CSE, we can never know when our private conversations are actually being intercepted.

One tiny way to push back is to continue to be bold in asserting the importance of freedom of speech, even what circumstances compel that right to be used anonymously.

To leave anonymous comments on this site, just use whatever made-up name you like, including ‘anonymous’. If you use anon@sindark.com as your email address, you will get an anonymous logo beside your comment.

None of this is intended as an endorsement of the amorphous group ‘Anonymous‘.

On sindark.com

sindark.com might seem like a rather random URL for this site, which consists of a mixture of posts on climate change, photography, Ottawa, and other general subjects of interest to me. The genesis of the name is a long one. Back when I was an undergraduate at UBC, a friend of mine exposed me to the James Joyce poem “Nightpiece” which contains the sonorous line: “Night’s sindark nave.” I chose that as the title for my blog at the time, which was still produced and hosted using Google’s Blogger service.

The site underwent several evolutions – moving to a private hosting company and eventually to being managed through WordPress. It also got a major update after I finished at UBC. Along with that update came the new name: “a sibilant intake of breath”. As such, the current name has nothing to do with the current URL, except insofar as both are taken from literature.

The address of the site is potentially problematic, insofar as it contains misleading theological overtones. It may communicate something a bit useful, in that this site is pretty anti-religious, but that is hardly the most important thing to highlight. As such, it is probably a good idea to eventually migrate to a new address, probably leaving all the old content where it is now.

The new address should ideally be something short and memorable, which is certainly challenging in a crowded internet landscape. I would strongly prefer for it to be .com, rather than .org or .net or anything like that. That preference isn’t driven by the view that .com sites are commercial. Rather, I just see .com as the default and easier for users to remember and use than any of the alternatives. It also offers the most flexibility, since the content of the site is not partly linked to the name.

Something like milanilnyckyj.com or ilnyckyj.com would be possible, but both are impossible to spell and less memorable than a more common word or combination of words. Perhaps I should dig back through some of my favourite pieces of writing to find a snippet of text that passes the tests of being concise, sticking in the mind of the reader, and being available with a ‘.com’ appended to the end.

Fairness and accuracy

It occurred to me recently that when writing about factual matters, fairness and accuracy do not necessarily go hand in hand.

Specifically, it is quite possible to make accurate statements that are not fair – for instance, because they lack context. This is especially true when it comes to actions that were taken in unusually difficult circumstances. For example, it can be said with complete accuracy that TEPCO – the company that operates the Fukushima nuclear complex – has intentionally put workers in situations where their lives have been at risk due to radiation and explosion dangers. Just saying that, however, is not especially fair. TEPCO has made those choices when faced with the terrifying prospect of massive radioactive release from breached reactors and/or spent fuel pools.

Naturally, there are less dramatic examples. For instance, it is quite different to accidentally injure somebody when playing a contact sport carefully than it is to intentionally injure someone while motivated by malice. You can make the accurate statement: “John broke Frank’s nose.” But fairness often requires that you say: “Because he didn’t like the way Frank looked at him” or “By accident while they were enjoying a spirited rugby match.”

I am not sure if it is possible to be fair without being accurate. Perhaps. For instance, you could strategically omit information that would unduly prejudice the person who you are communicating with. Arguably, you could even provide information which is misleading but which helps to convey an accurate overall picture. You could say something like: “Doctors made every effort to save the patient’s life”, even though there was a million-dollar operation that had a 0.5% chance of saving the person.

The Moral Landscape

Traditionally, science is understood as having limited authority on ethical questions. While scientific knowledge is useful for understanding the world better – including in ways that change our moral thinking – the idea that you can have a scientific answer to a moral question is usually rejected. That position is itself rejected by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values. Harris argues that we can use science to develop an objective sense of what is good for human beings and what is not, and that we can judge various practices using that scale. The book sharply and effectively criticizes both religious perspectives on the nature of the world and moral relativism. Indeed, the author’s principle project seems to be the development of a non-religious alternative to relativism, based around cognitive science. For the most part, his argument strikes me as a convincing one. That, in turn, has some important implications for political debates.

Harris’ book is a complex one that makes many different arguments and points. Often, he is able to illustrate his logic through clear examples, though some of them feel a bit cliched. He could also have devoted more attention to criticizing intuitive moral reasoning within western societies. He manages some elegant and convincing rebuttals, such as his response to the scapegoat problem on page 79 of the hardcover edition.

One key element of Harris’ argument is the view that it is the conscious life of animals that matters, when it comes to the basis of ethics: “[Q]uestions about values – about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose – are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures”. He argues this point convincingly, and suggests that we can build from that claim and from factual understanding of cognitive science to robust ethical judgements. Harris pays relatively little attention to non-human animals, but that is clearly an area into which such thinking can be extended, when it comes to questions like factory farming or veganism. Harris says that: “The only thing wrong with injustice is that it is, on same level, actually or potentially bad for people”. A richer ethical theory might incorporate the interests of other conscious organisms in some way.

Some of Harris’ concerns do seem a bit exaggerated. For instance, when he walks about the danger of “the societies of Europe” being “refashion[ed]” into “a new Caliphate”. He also has a bit too much faith in the power of brain scans as they now exist. Being able to track which parts of the brain receive more blood flow than others is useful, but doesn’t necessarily allow us to develop nuanced pictures of complex ideas and thought processes. As such, his argument that since functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of people thinking about mathematical equations resemble those of people considering ethical propositions, we should consider that evidence that the two are similar things.

Ultimately, the argument made in The Moral Landscape is utilitarian. We can come to know the basics of what makes up a good human life, and we should arrange states and global society so that people can experience them (and so that they avoid experiencing the worst things, like slavery and total personal insecurity). He makes the important point that we cannot expect to know all the consequences of particular choices, but we can nonetheless reach firm conclusions about important problems. Societies that provide education for women are better than societies that keep them in ignorance. That claim can be justified, according to Harris, by carefully examining the mental lives of people living in both kinds of society.

In particular, Harris highlights how societies that are based upon secular ethics consistently do better in measurable ways than those which are most explicitly modeled on religious ethics. “Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands”, Harris explains, “which are consistently the most atheistic societies on earth – consistently rate better tan religious nations on measures like like expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy, GDP, child welfare, economic equality, economic competitiveness, gender equality, health care, investments in education, rates of university enrollment, internet access, environmental protection, lack of corruption, political stability, and charity to poorer nations, etc”. He attributes the claim to P. Zuckerman’s 2008 book Society Without God.

Harris’ purpose is not a dispassionate one, focused on description. He says clearly that: “[c]hanging people’s ethical commitments… is the most important task facing humanity in the twenty-first century”. I am not sure if I quite agree. You can argue that people need to change the fundamental basis of their ethical views in order to deal with a world of 6.7 billion people. Alternatively, you can see the problem as the disconnect between the choices people make and the ethical views they already possess. If people could directly see the consequences of their choices, I think their existing ethical systems would often drive them to behave otherwise. It is because the consequences are mostly hidden – largely imposed on people in other places, and in the future – that people often make choices that are so oblivious to the harm they are forcing upon other conscious creatures. Harris argues that “one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions”. I think that is especially true when it comes to economics, public policy, and the environment.

Time zones / New York Times

During the last few days, I have been corresponding regularly with my brother in Melbourne and my friend Antonia in Oxford. I have my iPhone clock set up to display the time zones in both places. Those linkages create an interesting sense of continuity within the day, with each area passing through times of wakefulness and probable sleep. All told, it is a bit comforting, despite the unending stream of new bad news from Japan.

It reminds me of a line from Wordsworth: “Rolled round the Earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

The last few days have also been a reminder of the reporting quality of The New York Times. A lot of what I am seeing in other news sources is basically transcribed (with attribution) from NYT coverage. Like The Economist which famously stated the intention of the paper at the outset, The New York Times apparently started with a rather bold mandate back in 1851:

We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good;—and we shall be Radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment and radical reform. We do not believe that everything in Society is either exactly right or exactly wrong;—what is good we desire to preserve and improve;—what is evil, to exterminate, or reform.

This situation certainly shows the value of an elaborate news organization that can deploy reporters and photographers, access experts, and make use of connections within governments. Say what you will about blogs and Twitter, but what they provide is much more commentary than real journalism.

Reading momentum

On top of a chest of drawers, I have about six tall stacks of partially read books. Each horizontal stack contains about ten volumes, lying atop one another with spines facing into the room. Most of them are serious tomes on environmental topics or difficult novels that I have received as gifts. It is relatively rare that I come home from a day of work in the kind of headspace where sitting down with something challenging – in a literary or intellectual sense – is terribly appealing. Weekends, too, tend to be filled up with laundry and catching up on a work week’s neglected sleep. As such, the books tend to sit unread for weeks, and months, and years.

One trick I have found is to give myself a bit of mental cheesecake – a book that is quick and delicious. For instance, a novel that doesn’t require you to keep track of the storylines of multiple family members across different generations, perhaps punctuated by nauseating sexual violence. Or a non-fiction book that is not a depressing trudge through all the ways humanity is wrecking the planet that sustains us.

Malcolm Gladwell’s books often play this role well. So can classic novels, which often lack the flourishes that Booker Prize judges seem to fixate upon but which often make the books into impossible morasses that can only be passed through as the result of determined and uninterrupted effort.

Not only does the cheesecake book itself get read quickly and enjoyably, but it also conveys a certain forward momentum to the general project of reading, and sometimes makes me make some progress against one of the heavier items in my long queue.