IAQ

Q: I want to become a role model for conservative men. How do I do it?

A: Ditch your fiancee and children and get down on bended knee to propose marriage to a famous pop-star.

Update: You'll slip somewhat in their estimation once word gets out about the fiancee and kids.

Op-Shop Book Corner

As the Twig is Bent by Terry Lane (Dove Communications, Melbourne 1979)

This book (ex Aquinas College, Ringwood) was actually a genuine find. In it, Lane presents interviews with sixteen prominent Australians about their childhood. One of them is the historian Manning Clark of whom Lane writes:

…Manning Clark has become an outspoken critic of Australian Society in his books, articles, speeches and broadcasts, expressing a profound pessimism about the future. The events of November 1975, ‘that year in which the money-changers and accountants – the men with a passion for interest rates as dionysiacal as the passion of some men for "other things" – were to have their terrible day of triumph’, have left him deeply disturbed. Because of his defence of the Whitlam government … there was a storm over his commission to broadcast the Boyer Lectures on the ABC in 1976. An attempt to censor the lectures before they were recorded was thwarted when it was made public.

Of course that sort of thing couldn’t happen in these comfortable and relaxed times. On to an excerpt from the interview – Clark’s gloomy concluding remarks:

Perhaps my childhood was always at my elbow, as it were, helping me to dream the dream that one day I might put down on paper the story of why we are as we are and why, wherever I am, whether in Moscow, London, New York or at Harvard, I know deep down where I belong and that Australia is always for me the ‘shire for men who understand’.

But it is also a place where many people seem to belong to a different world from mine. Some of them are provoked to great wrath by what I try to say. That too has been part of what Henry James called my ‘complex fate’. There is one side of me which believes all those shouters and mockers will gradually fade away, but another part tells me they are with me forever in Australia – that Australia belongs to them.

Some days I feel the same about the blogosphere. Others, I’m embarrassed to find myself counted among the shouters and mockers. That’s just part of my ‘complex fate’.

(Cross-Posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

Half a Leg

I was hanging around the street, a little way up from the entrance to the pub where I go for the trivia quiz on Thursday nights. It was one of the breaks between rounds so I’d slipped out for a smoke and a chance to think over a remark I’d made in conversation with a team-mate. I’d just discovered a belief that I didn’t know I had and it seemed to be a good time to start thinking over how to fit it in alongside the old ones and which of the old beliefs were going to need clearing out to accommodate it.

A friendly female voice called out to me "Are you OK there." I’m a sucker for friendly female voices. I replied "Yeah, sure," and tried to pick up my train of thought, but she wasn’t any of that.

"Just had to ask," she said, "Because I’m that sort of person – y’know, when I see someone who might be having a bit of trouble, I’ve got to do something, y’know?"

"Ah-hah." I said, and wandered away up the street a little, still pre-occupied with the new belief problem. She wasn’t having any of that either.

"Hey, don’t take yourself so seriously," she said, "It’s not worth it. I know about these things. See, I’ve got half a leg."

I was starting to regret lighting a second cigarette but I was also fascinated. It’s not every night you meet a drunkenly cheerful extrovert who’s a bit deficient in the leg department. She was blonde and not entirely unattractive as well so I was temporarily endeared to her.

She’d made it clear that, whether I liked it or not, we were going to have a conversation, so I put on my friendly face and moved a little closer. While I did, I took stock of her legs – one foot in a running shoe, the other in a white sock and a sandal with a velcroed strap. I made the count one and a half legs at least but, given what they can do with prosthetics these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if I overestimated by a whole leg.

"I mean, these people here with their trivia, they take it so seriously, y’know? They need to get a sense of perspective …"

I knew what she meant – since I was one of those people there for the trivia but I decided to keep quiet about that.

"… It’s not that important and I should know – I’ve got half a leg!"

"What is it with these people? Why do they take it so seriously?" she asked, "We were sitting at this table and someone asked me to stop copying her answers. So I told her it wasn’t that important – she needs to get a sense of perspective. Look, I said, it's not that important. I should know – I’ve got half a leg."

One and half legs, I corrected her silently. And as it happens I know someone – distantly – who’s only got one leg and a stump and she doesn’t carry on about it the way you do, as far as I know she doesn’t use it as an excuse to crib at trivia nights and maybe she’s smart enough to leave people alone when they want to be left alone too.

I didn’t say any of that, of course, because the last thing you want to do when you have a drunkenly cheerful, egocentric extrovert on your hands is turn them into a drunkenly angry, egocentric extrovert. I took another drag on my ciggie – the sooner I got it smoked down to a buttable length and got back inside, the better but I didn’t want to provoke any "Wazzamatta? My not good enough for ya" stuff either.

A young buck came out of the pub, walked round to the driver’s side of the car we were both standing beside and fished in his pocket.

"Oh shit!" He said, "I’ve left the keys in the car."

"No darl’ – you left them on the table inside."

"No, I’m pretty sure they’re in the car."

"I saw them on the table, I’m sure of it. Go back and have a look."

He complied – he obviously knew better than to contradict her too. I looked at my cigarette – nearly there. Close enough to risk an attempt to channel our mainly one-side conversation onto a less touchy topic than trivia buffs who take themselves too seriously because they’re over-leggy.

"Men, eh?" I quipped. Before she could respond, her buck came out of the pub again.

"No they’re not on the table." He said.

"Well where are they then?"

By now he’d reached the driver’s side of the car. He looked in the window.

"They’re in the car – I can see them on the driver’s seat."

It was a perfect chance for me to bugger off, before I got dragged in any deeper. I took it.

IAQ

How can I tell if my cognitive functions are coming back on-line after a long down?

A good test is to make a cup of coffee. If you fill the kettle from the tap because it feels too light, then pour the water straight into the cup, you may still have a little way left to go.

Simply Irresistible

The Oz lobs a banana peel onto the pavement of public debate ...

prat falls ...

and blames the fruiterer for selling the banana.

Pure Chaplin!

Word of the Day: Equanimity

We haven’t had one of these for a very long time, have we? According to Zeppo Bakunin’s old Concise Oxford, equanimity is:

Evenness of mind or temper; composure; resignation, acceptance of
fate.

It’s a mood that I’ve learnt to treasure, especially in times when gladness, joy and happiness have seemed hopelessly out of reach, thanks either to external circumstances or internal brain-chemistry. When equanimity is as good as it gets, you take it, not gladly of course but equably. With equanimity.
Sometimes I’m foolish enough to accept an inferior substitute – an afternoon of deluded hope perhaps, or the false equanimity of the writing mood, giving an account of that afternoon and subsequent events, distanced from them emotionally by the role of author. This false equanimity doesn’t last – when you’ve just sent off an E-mail asking someone to post a snarky comment on a blog, under your blog persona because your net connection isn’t working too well or you have an "Oh for crying out loud! Can’t you read!" attack at a comment on a recent post – the counterfeit becomes obvious.

An obvious counterfeit immediately loses its value. So I’m not exactly writing this in a mood of equanimity either. So I’m off to lie down and let the sadness and despair wash over me for a while until I’m comfortably numb again. Then maybe I’ll be able to tackle the topic of what "welfare dependency" looks like from the inside. Starting with the obsessive, but very necessary habit, of asking every time you see a potential exit from the maze, "Am I going to lose money by going this way?"

Postscript: in between writing the rest of this post and publishing (or re-publishing) it, I did the sensible thing and called a friend to invite myself over to her place. I got coffee, empathy, a sense of perspective reboot and a brand new hand me down wok. As soon as it’s cleaned up I plan to get in some serious pleasant activitity therapy involving chicken, vegetables, rice stick noodles and various condiments and spices.

Bonus Kitchen Tip: the Stanley 65-549 screwdriver is very handy for separating chicken thigh fillets that have frozen into a solid block.

Op-Shop Book Corner

This week: Ballbreaking by Robert Spicer (Animo Books, 1983)

I’m not promising that this is going to become a regular series – my record on that score is pretty spotty. Not Dalmatian spotty; more like Dalmatian with alopecia spotty. It all depends on how the supply of curious books at my local op-shop holds up.

According to the blurb, Robert Spicer’s Ballbreaking:

… shatters the common conceptions of what relationships between men and women in the affluent Western world are really all about!

Derryn Hinch promises:

You will be outraged, alarmed and challenged by Bob Spicer’s theories. There is enough fuel here for a thousand feminist fires. And I thought I was
controversial!

And according to John Michael Howson:

A controversial subject deserves a controversial point of view – perceptive and brave…

So, what’s in the book?

According to Spicer’s introduction:

This book is based largely on hundreds of informal discussions with women and men of all ages and backgrounds. The results have been obtained rather
under-handedly, in much the same way as one gets the real opinion of the white
Afrikaner in South Africa, as distinct from the stated opinions he has
whitewashed for general exhibition.

First, by establishing the outlook of the individual being interviewed in each case, and then by appearing to identify with that point of view, one can draw other more deeply hidden attitudes into the open…

I don’t know why Spicer describes this research method as underhand; it’s instantly familiar to anyone who has found themselves in one of those awkward conversations at a bar where that amiable stranger gets a little too deep into his cups and starts sounding off about his ex-wife. Then it’s time to start muttering a non-committal "Uh-huh" now and then, while you finish your drink as quickly as you can without being obvious about it, make some excuse that the shit-faced loon won’t remember anyway and get the hell out. Unless you’re doing informal social research - then I guess you might offer to buy your new acquaintance another.

From his hundreds of informal conversations, Spicer has constructed a manual for prospective ballbreakers throughout the western world. And why not? After all:

Men deserve everything they get, and more, for allowing themselves to be debased, abused and manipulated by a strictly speaking inferior creature. Nevertheless, they do it, and given the conspiracy against them from birth, I daresay it is understandable and forgivable.

Though Spicer maintains, in the Introduction, that his book is a tongue in cheek attempt to present a serious message, a warning to men of the ways women seek to entrap them in their lesser selves and an exhortation to women to stop debasing, abusing and manipulating their natural superiors, methinks he protesteth too much. The sage advice he gives women in the rest of the book on how first to entrap their victim, and then pussy-whip him into complete and abject submission looks more like a gender sell-out – a progression from misogyny to misandry and hence complete misanthropy.

Why is it that low women seek to dominate the inherently nobler sex of man? According to Chapter One, "The decision for prostitution" It all begins in early childhood:

When a little girl sells her first kiss for a lolly, the stage is set. Whether it be to a her father or the boy next door, it’s all over bar the shouting. Why on earth should one involve oneself with the odious and objectionable business
of making a living, when for such a little favour one can have the fruits of
someone else’s labour – man’s.

At a very early age, the majority of women decide to become prostitutes. Not, of course, honestly and openly; you must remember that to succeed, you must never be honest. Man will never suspect for a moment that his creature on a pedestal is not honest, therefore the need for honesty is, in fact, non-existent.

To be a common prostitute is, of course to be a complete fool; you should quite rightly despise her for selling her services for a pittance, overlooking their potential value and thereby debasing the product…

Men should adore the common prostitute for her openness and honesty, but the good women in their lives have succeeded in keeping the whole shooting match very firmly in the closet.

Forget Damned Whores and God’s Police – once that first kiss has been sold, either to a dumb father, who really ought to know better, or to the boy next door, who can hardly be blamed for allowing his innocent sexual urges get the better of him, the die is cast. A woman’s choice in this world is to be either a damned whore or a damneder whore and that’s that.

All Spicer’s chapters finish with a summary, in point form, of the chapter’s main findings and hints for the prospective ballbreaker. Here’s number twelve from chapter one – it might cure a few blokes out there who’re still having trouble with a touch of the old Madonna/Whore complex:

Romantic love as man perceives it has no place in your life except to the degree that he must be deceived into believing that it is the only thing in your life.

Actually, on reflection, number eleven is better:

Your purpose is initially to attract and please man, and thereafter to
manipulate his emotional deficiencies and to maximise his earning potential for
your own benefit through his inadequacies, insecurities and moral conditioning.

Don’t forget, when it comes down to it the poor boob actually deserves it. As numerous on-line commentators will no doubt attest.

(Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

One Small Step For A Blogger …

… but, when it comes down to it, not a particularly large one for society. The anonymous one has been under doctor’s orders to flog a piece of writing. Last week he finally cracked it, and his name is up on the web at one of those pay-per-view on-line mags. Unfortunately, neither of us has seen the finished article as a web page, because we don’t have a subscription to the site in question. This bothers the anonymous one not one whit as long as the readies come through – he remains content to allow me to carry the burdens of on-line notoriety. Precious bastard!
Just to show how precious the bugger can be about not putting his own, less than euphonious name, out in public, here’s a theatre review he duck-shoved onto me to write.

Pastorale

I picked up The Roadmender by Michael Fairless (Illustrated by E.W. Waite) at the local op-shop, in the two dollar job lot of books that included that copy of Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness, where an anonymous annotator had trenchantly dissected the character of Judy. In the publication details on the reverse of the title page (embossed at the bottom with the legend PERCY HUME, BOOKSELLER, SHEPPARTON) the book is described as “New Edition, Reset” with publication dates from October 1911 to June 1923.

The book is in three sections – “The Roadmender”, “Out of the Shadow” and “The White Gate”. The first and last sections are set in the English countryside, the middle section in London. The London section, with its references to the funeral of Queen Victoria, gives the only indication of the book’s supposed time of writing. With its overwrought metaphors, little romantic vignettes of bucolic poverty, musings on Wagner and hortatory religious reflections, it’s one of the finest pieces of sentimental clap-trap I’ve ever read in my life. And I’m still only two thirds of the way through it, so there are probably a few more delights to come.

I have attained my ideal: I am a roadmender, some say stonebreaker. Both titles are correct, but the one is more pregnant than the other. All day I sit by the roadside on a stretch of grass under a high hedge of saplings and a tangle of traveller’s joy, woodbine, sweetbriar and late roses. Opposite me is a white gate, seldom used, if one may judge from the trail of the honeysuckle growing tranquilly along it: I know now that whenever and wherever I die my soul will pass out through this white gate; and then, thank God, I shall not have need to undo that trail.

In our youth we discussed our ideals freely: I wonder how many beside myself have attained, or would understand my attaining. After all, what do we ask of life, here or indeed hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with our fellow-men and with ourselves; and from the lap of earth to look up into the face of God? All these gifts are mine as I sit by the winding road and serve the footsteps of my fellows …

That’s just the opening of the first section, full of those romantic vignettes of rural poverty that I mentioned earlier – “Fairless’” own (it's evident from the text that Fairless is a pseudonym), self-imposed poverty, and that of the people who pass along “his” road, providing Fairless with the opportunity to take a little time-out from his self-aggrandising religious meditations:

… Morning and night I serve with the Gibeonites, their curse my blessing, as no doubt it was theirs when their hearts were purged by service… The Gibeonites were servants in the house of God, ministers of the sacrament of service even as the High Priest himself; and I sharing their high office of servitude, thank God that the ground was accursed for my sake, for surely that curse was the womb of all unborn blessing.

His hero-worship of Wagner:

What a wonderful work Wagner has done for humanity in translating the toil of life into the readable script of music! For those who seek the tale of other worlds his music is silent: but earth-travail under his wand becomes instinct with rhythmic song to an accompaniment of the elements, and the blare and crash of the bottomless pit itself.

And his gloomy musings on the decline of civilisation as he knows it:

The swift stride of civilisation is leaving behind individual effort, and turning man into the Daemon of a machine. To and fro in front of the long loom, lifting a lever at either end, paces he who once with painstaking intelligence drove the shuttle. Then he tasted the joy of completed work, that which his eye had looked upon and his hands had handled; now his work is as little finished as the web of Penelope. Once the reaper grasped the golden corn stems, and with dextrous sweep of sickle set free the treasure of the earth… now he sits serene on Juggernaut’s car, its guiding Daemon, and the field is silent to him.

There’s something I forgot to mention earlier – there’s a shitload of purple prose in the book too.

All that said, I have to give Fairless his due; maybe once or twice during the course of his mental meanderings, he gets his head far enough out of his arse to notice something worth recording, and manages to describe it in a style that doesn’t completely overwhelm his subject matter:

There is an old couple in our village who are past work. The married daughter has made shift to take her mother and the parish half-crown, but there is neither room nor food for the father, and he must go to N--. If husband and wife went together they would be separated at the workhouse door. The parting had to come; it came yesterday. I saw them stumbling lamely down the road on their last journey together, walking side by side without touch or speech, seeing and heeding nothing but a blank future. As they passed me the old man said gruffly, “Tis far eno’; better be getting back”; but the woman shook her head and they breasted the hill together. At the top they paused, shook hands, and separated; one went on, the other turned back; and as the the old woman limped blindly by I turned away, for there are sights a man dare not look upon. She passed; and I heard a child’s shrill voice say, “I come to look for you, Gran”: and I thanked God that there need be no utter loneliness in the world while it holds a little child.

Well, come on, I never said that “Fairless” demonstrated any insight into what he was seeing, did I?

(Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

As They Say In The Classics –D’Oh!

I was on the phone to the ex the other day. Although we’re divorced, we still have one or two loose ends to cut off, such as finally winding up the family business – but that’s a whole other story, for some imagined future time when I can deal with the subject with a bit of equanimity.

We got into one of those conversations about where things went wrong. Not the bitter kind but the kind where you look back on things and decide that, all things considered, you didn’t do too badly and you’re left with mild, almost painless feelings regret for what might have been but couldn’t. In that mood I said, “Maybe we should have a divorce anniversary do this year.”

“You’ve missed it again!” she answered, “You know, there’s probably a blog in that.”

She’s right, damn it. Again.

Judging Judy

I’ve never met Judy, but it seems that Bertrand Russell had her pegged way back in 1930:

When I speak of ‘the sinner’, I do not mean the man who commits sins; sins are committed by everyone or no one, according to our definition of the word. I mean the man who is absorbed in the consciousness of sin. This man is perpetually incurring his own disapproval, which, if he is religious he interprets as the disapproval of God. He has an image of himself as he thinks he ought to be,
which is in continual conflict with his knowledge of himself as he is. If, in
his conscious thought, he has long since discarded the maxims that he was taught
at his mother’s knee, his sense of sin may be buried deep in his unconscious,
and only emerge when he is drunk or asleep. Nevertheless, it may suffice to take
the savour out of everything. At bottom he still accepts all the prohibitions he
was taught in infancy. Swearing is wicked; drinking is wicked; ordinary business
shrewdness is wicked; above all, sex is wicked… The one pleasure that he
desires with his whole soul is that of being approvingly caressed by his mother
[father], which he can remember having experienced in childhood. This pleasure
being no longer open to him, he feels that nothing matters: since he must sin,
he decides to sin deeply.

That’s from the Unwin Books reprint (1961) of Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness. Whoever annotated the book thought the emphasized sections of that excerpt described Judy pretty well – except for that bit about Judy’s mother fixation, which was corrected, in pencil, by the annotator.

Obviously, Russell didn’t have Judy when he was writing Chapter II "Byronic Unhappiness" but the annotator recognized another of Judy’s boring habits in the first page of the chapter:

I am persuaded that those who quite sincerely attribute their sorrows to their views about the universe are putting the cart before the horse: the truth is that they are unhappy for some reason of which they are not aware, and this
unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics of the
world in which they live.

Suitably rephrased, I bet that sentiment was just the thing to stop Judy in her tracks when she started banging on about the absurdity of human existence, The Myth of Sisyphus and all the rest of that existentialist crap.

If Judy was swearing, drinking, dealing and fornicating her way through the sixties, she was probably a war baby. Which explains why I never met her at any parties when I got around to doing a bit of swearing, drinking and fornicating on my own account the following decade.

But bad language, drinking and the rest, do not a happy Judy make, particularly if they’re driven by her neurotic desire to "sin", as Russell and our annotator confirm in the last chapter of the book:

The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most
importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in
certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular
kind of self-absorption.

Now that we know the cause of Judy’s unhappiness, there’s time for one last reflection on how Judy’s traditional religion has affected her relations with other people:

To be the recipient of affection is a potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands affection is not the man upon whom it is bestowed. The man who receives affection is, broadly speaking, the man who gives it. But it is useless to give it as a calculation in the way in which one might lend money at interest …

Poor Judy – continually trading off sex for professions of affection. If only she’d read the book for herself, she might have found the way to a more genuine and abiding sense of happiness:

Happiness is of two sorts, though, of course, there are intermediate
degrees. … [they] might be distingushed as plain and fancy, or animal and
spiritual, or of the heart and head … The happiness of my gardener is of
[the first sort]; he wages a perennial war against rabbits, of which he
speaks exactly as Scotland Yard speaks of Bolsheviks; he considers them
dark, designing and ferocious, and is of the opinion that they can only be
met by a cunning equal to their own. Like the heroes of Valhalla who spent
every day hunting a certain wild boar, which they killed every evening but
which miraculously came to life again the next morning, my gardener can slay
his enemy one day without any fear that the enemy will have disappeared the
next day. …the fount of joy is inexhaustible and it is ‘they rabbits’ that
supply it.

But, you will say, these simple delights are not open to superior people
like ourselves. [Now, isn’t that just typically Judy?] What joy can we experience in
waging war on such puny creatures as rabbits? The argument, to my mind, is a
poor one. A rabbit is very much larger than a yellow-fever bacillus, and yet a
superior person can find happiness in making war on the latter…

Maybe that’s how Judy finally achieved happiness – perhaps now she looks back on her youth as a successful personal war on sexual frustration. Who knows? Only Judy and a few blokes with fond memories of this night when they met a chick who’d had a few too many.

(Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

Snob of the Week

I took a look at the Age/SMH Good Weekend today and learnt that Anna Wintour is the editor of American Vogue and that she is lampooned in the film The Devil Wears Prada which is to be released here in September. Her friend Barbara Amiel isn't too pleased at the way Anna is depicted in the film:

Since time immemorial, people of limited or average ability and energy have consoled themselves that they understand the more important values in life, such as relationships and intimacy, as though these things were not available to energetic, talented people. This is a literary convention that fuels many a work on stage and screen as well as between covers. One of the commonest ways by which this is done is to depict these powerful and successful beings as human failures.

... People like to be reassured that though they don't amount to much, what matters is that their friends love them ... But half-truths wrapped around lies can always make the incredible sound credible - to the gullible.

Later, to show just how wrong the makers of The Devil Wears Prada have got their caricature of Wintour (renamed Miranda Priestly in the film), Amiel tells us:

Meryl Streep's Miranda has little connection with ... Wintour, either in style or substance. Wintour's ears would never display the oversized hoop earrings Streep wears in the film. The clunky shoe that stretches out of the limousine in a brief shot when Miranda first appears would never appear on Wintour. She wears only Manolo Blahnik, whose shop windows have not been darkened by clunkiness.

In the end, Amiel does concede that Wintour has one or two imperfections, including a certain naive other-worldliness:

I encountered [Anna] once under the canopy of a Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. She looked a knockout , wearing a fantastic Yves St Laurent snakeskin trenchcoat. "You must have it," she said. "Go and get it. There's a size 36 left." I wanted to ask what it cost but hadn't the guts.

That afternoon, I forked out $12,000 for the same coat and took it home for an hour, only to return it the same day. When she asked me later, I mumbled something about having exhausted my budget for the season. "But it's only $3000," she said.

Postscript: comments are enabled again for those as wants to use 'em.

Hiatus Update

With thinking too there is a time for ploughing and a time for harvesting

Culture and Value, Ludwig Wittgenstein, second edition ed von Wright and Pischler, 1998

Nothing to see here

Move along.

Gummo Trotsky has spat the dummy, taken his bat and ball and gone home, yet again.

For the Record

About forty-one years ago, my parents decided they were sick of living in the slummier part of a class-ridden, snobbery-ridden society that offered them few prospects for upward mobility and dragged their arses, and mine, and those of my siblings, 13,000 miles around the world to a country where, they hoped, prospects were better. And so they were.

One of the things you might reasonably expect would also be left behind, was the ingrained snobbery of the old country, with all its manufactured excuses for one class to look down on another. The last thing I would have expected was to see it replicated, however unwittingly, on a blog but, a few weeks ago, this post appeared at catallaxy. I had one of those "oh for crying out loud" moments but, apart for a little too much off-line bitching about the author of the post, I decided not to make too much of it.

A little later, I found Rafe Champion's paper on Bill Hutt (PDF) at the HR Nicholls society site, where that Lion and the Ostrich post turned up again, this time as an appendix to Rafe's exposition of eight myths of trade unionism. Once again, I ignored it - what was it to me if the impartial seekers after truth at that august society were having a few giggles at the idea of English slum-dwellers of the 1930s doing wee-wees and poo-poos in cupboard drawers? I decided, again that it wasn't worth writing about.

This week, it turned up once again, at catallaxy, where Rafe presented his Hutt paper once more, in instalments, with this introduction to the first episode:

The capitulation of Kim Beazley to the unions on the issue of work contracts has ensured that industrial relations will be a live issue for some months to come. We are likely to hear endless repetition of a number of myths about the role of the trade unions and it may be helpful to have an alternative point of view for balance.

This differs a little from the introduction he gave it in his presentation at the HR Nicholls society:

Question: How long will it take us to get to a labour market regime based on freedom?
Answer. Some time after Bill Hutt becomes a household name among people who are interested in industrial relations
...

The centralized system of wage fixing in Australia was designed to replace the “rude and barbarous” situation in the nineteenth century with a “new province for law and order”. This expectation was based on a number of assumptions about the nature of the economic system that evolved in the Industrial Revolution and the place of the workers and their associations in that system.

Both introductions convey the impression that Rafe's paper on Hutt is intended to have some bearing on the Australian situation, but Rafe assures us that this is not so. He wishes to be considered a non-combatant in the political, or ideological, battle over that subject. I'll return to Rafe's wish later.

It's sobering to realise, that even a mere ten years in a slum environment can leave you with a chip on your shoulder big enough that you are angered even by accidental, and no doubt unintended, disparagement of slum-dwellers thousands of miles away and decades ago. And clearly it's unreasonable, and bespeaks the existence of a few ishooze, to be angered when a historical consensus that largely agrees with your own family history, is questioned in a spirit of free and open intellectual inquiry. Over the past couple of days my on-line persona has become decidedly unpleasant, so it's time to take another break.

So, as far as I'm concerned, Rafe is welcome to his non-combatant status. I'd suggest that if he wishes to keep it, he needs to refrain from a few activities, such as:

• Posting reading lists for other bloggers;
  


• Decrying the failure of post-modernists (whoever they are) to engage with critical rationalism, the failure of trade union ideologues to engage with the ideas of WH Hutt - non-combatants do not seek engagement with anybody;
  


• Decrying the shoddy and dishonest scholarship of TEH LEFT - non-combatants do not concern themselves with the relative merits of the contending forces;
  


• Decrying TEH LEFT as slaves to a false paradigm - neither do non-combatants concern themselves with the merits of the combatant's strategies.

That is not an exhaustive list - there are no doubt a few things I've overlooked that Rafe could do to jeopardise his non-combatant status but that's not my problem. I'm on hiatus again.

Make Money for Commenting on Blogs!

There's one small catch - it all goes to Medicins sans Frontieres.

Another Bloody Meme!

Yes, those new memes keep on coming. I nearly missed this one. Apparently it's bog-paper Monday.

What the hell - here are some bog-roll pictures for you all to enjoy. Just remember - ultimately they all come from trees. Like banknotes, except in Australia, where the banknotes ultimately come from oil wells.

The Fabulous Lombe Brothers

Isn't serendipity wonderful? After writing up Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (one of the late nineteenth century founding fathers of modern economics), I decided to go back to the beginning of Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers and, yes, actually read the whole book. Several pages into the chapter on Adam Smith, after I'd read Heilbroner's exposition of Smith's theory of the market, I found this:

Does the world really work this way? To a very real degree it did in the days of Adam Smith. Even in his time, of course, there were already factors that acted as restraints against the free operation of the market system... And already there were more disquieting signs to be read. The Lombe brothers' factory was more than a mere marvel of engineering and a source of wonderment to the visitor: it betokened the coming of large scale industry and the emergence of individual employers who were immensely powerful individual actors in the market...

I immediately decided that I had to know more about these Lombe brothers, especially given Heilbroner's description of working conditions in the factory:

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845-1926)

Another Great Dickhead of History

I discovered Francis Ysidro Edgeworth while flicking through Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers, looking for dirt on Stanley Jevons, one of the alleged inventors of consumption theory. Edgeworth was a contemporary of Jevons who, in 1881 published Mathematical Psychics a treatise on economics. According to Heilbroner (p171 in "my" copy):

... Edgeworth was not fascinated with economics because it justified or explained or condemned the world, or because it opened new vista, bright or gloomy, into the future. This odd soul was fascinated because economics dealt with quantities and because anything that dealt with quantities could be translated into mathematics...

To build up such a mathematical mirror of reality, the world obviously has tto be simplified. Edgeworth's simplification was this assumption: every man is a pleasure machine. [original emphasis, my literals and elisions]

Heilbroner continues with a few remarks on Edgeworth's character:

Of all men to have adopted such a view of society, Edgeworth seems a most unlikely choice. Hehimself was as ill-constructed a pleasure machine as can be imagined. Neurotically shy, he tended to flee from the pleasures to the privacy of his club; unhappy about the burden of material things, he received few of the pleasures that for most people flow from possessions... Perhaps his greatest source of pleasure was in the construction of his lovely economic Xanadu.

But regardless of his motives, Edgeworth's pleasure machine assumption bore wonderful intelletual fruit. For if economics was defined to be the study of human pleasure-mechanisms competing for shares of society's stock of pleasure, then it could be shown - with all the irrefutability of the differential calculus - that in a world of perfect competition each pleasure machine would achieve the highest amount of pleasure that could be meted out by society.

On reflection, I don't share Heilbroner's view that Edgeworth seems an unlikely person to have taken such a view of society - it's precisely the sort of idealised conception you might expect a neurotically shy person who shuns the pleasures of human company to take. And I'm inclined to doubt that his lovely economic Xanadu was his sole source of pleasure - my guess is that he had an impressively elaborate line in sexual fantasy as well. But given the era Edgeworth lived in, I'm happy to concur with Heilbroner's suggestion that the economic Xanadu was Edgeworth's greatest source of pleasure.

Edgeworth's character - neurotically shy, spartan, masturbative - would certainly explain his inability to understand why people, who ought if they were rational, to compete with each other for all the pleasure society had to offer - would insist on limiting their pleasures by combining in organisations such as trade unions (or more respectably, professional associations and chambers of commerce). Cut off from the pleasures of society by his shyness, he could not recognise that for most people, just hanging out is inherently enjoyable. And his intellectual solution to this problem - that hanging out, or combining with otheres to gain illusory "common benefit" is only effective in the short run and, in the long run, rationality, that is pure competition, will prevail is reminiscent of the chronic masturbator's belief that one day all the women in the world will come to their senses and break down his bedroom door.

Edgeworth's Mathematical Psychics included a chapter on a bloody struggle that was going on, at the time he wrote it, entitled "The Present Crisis in Ireland". I leave you with this interesting function, reproduced in Heilbroner, which Edgeworth used in his analysis of the crisis. I like to think of it as "Edgeworth's Irish Nationalism Function":

The Enchanted Toasting Fork - Episode 11

(Yes, I finally got my arse in front of the PC and got it written)

"OK, here goes," said Ruby, leaning back on the pillows, "The story of my bright, happy childhood ... You know, it would be a lot easier to believe you're actually interested in this if you'd stop that and just listen."

Petro stopped that and settled himself, rather elaborately; he moved closer to Ruby and with a show of casual nonchalance, managed to get his arm extended across the top of her head. She graciously took the hint, and settled herself on his shoulder, taking one arm out of play. That left his other hand free for that, but once Ruby had clasped it in twined fingers, that was pretty much out of the question. Ruby resumed her tale.

"So the fairy godmothers did their little number and that was that - everyone knew that, as usual, the christening was a right royal total stuff-up, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. So it was off to the palace dining room where the christening feast was laid out, and everyone did their best to put a good face on things with the help of the dozen cases of vintage champagne that had been put aside for the occasion, plus a dozen more that had been set aside for my Confirmation and then they started in on the Royal Wedding stock. It was the most monumental piss-up in the history of the kingdom. Hasn't been rivalled yet, apparently.

"I've only got this second hand, of course, but thanks to that business about 'always presenting a cheerful face to the world', I nearly starved to death within a couple of days of the christening. Normal babies cry when they're hungry - they don't smile angelically, giggle winsomely and then lapse into a coma. Fortunately for me the place physician was smart enough to realise what was what and he gave the wet nurse strict instructions to feed me every three hours during the day, whether I was crying or not."

Ruby drew herself a little closer to Petro; her body quivered against his, her hand trembled. He freed his hand from her grasp - not to do that, though he was tempted, but to draw her closer and, he hoped, still the vibrancy that seemed to be overwhelming her.

"We can skip the next bit, if it's too upsetting," he suggested, "Leave it for another time, perhaps."

"OK," she answered, "We'll skip my happy bright childhood and get tot the first of these ..."

She took hold of Petro's hand again, and guided it to the crest of her hip where a new chrysophrase had just pushed its way through her skin. "Of course, it wasn't a chrysophrase or a garnet - those started to come much later - it was a ruby, and a good sized one too." Petro's hand showed no signs of moving - his mind seemed to be completely off that - so she felt it was safe to move hers. She touched the tip of her nose.

"It was right here." she said.

"It came as a bit of a shock, but I was still stuck with showing a happy, vibrant face to the world, so everyone thought I was taking it in my stride. As if. Everyone in the palace quickly got used to seeing me with precious stones poking out of my complexion, so it needn't have been too bad.

"Except that the kingdom was in financial difficulties and my father had taken on a new Chancellor of the Exchequer whowas dead keen to get the Palace budget into surplus. And the rubies were quite valuable, even uncut. He talked my father into seeing 'fiscal sense' and I ended up in a well guarded room in the top of the highest tower in the palace, with a chamber maid to care for me and a professional appraiser to keep an eye on the rubies. Besides the armed guards at the bottom of the tower stairs, there were archers and falconers on watch round the battlements to make sure that no magpies, bower-birds or other thieving pests could get near me.

"Naturally, word got out that there was an enchanted princess locked in a tower of the Palace and the handsome Princes started to show up, all looking to fight their way past the guards, for the chance of a quick snog with yours truly. One finally turned up who was a little less half-witted than the rest - he brought a rope and a grappling hook and stole into the room by night. We snogged - I felt the magic lift - climbed down the rope and rode away on the obligatory white steed. It was an ex-police force Harley Electra Glide. A week later we were married.

"But that wasn't the end of the spell. Turns out that he wasn't a pure-bred royal. His mother had got a bit frisky with one of the gentlemen of the bed chamber while his Majesty, her husband had been off on a hunting trip or carousing with a couple of the ladies in waiting. Something like that. It happens a lot in royal circles. So I didn't turn out the perfect beauty he expected. And now the gems were nowhere as large and valuable as they used to be.

"After about six months I came home from opening a new health spa to find Prince Bastard and the most exfoliated of our ladies in waiting in bed together. We argued, I left, the next year there was agreat scandal when she brought a little quarter Princess into the world.

"And that's pretty much it," Ruby finished, with evident relief, "So, how did you get to be an out-of-work wizard?"

Petro didn't answer - his mind had wandered back to that and the task of convincing Ruby that, right now, that would be a lot more interesting than listening to his life story.