Bell, Book And Candle

BELL

I went to the Beaumont English Language Library (BELL) (www.beaumontenglishlibrary.com) to hear a presentation by Julia Rothenberg of Harvard University on James Joyce's Ulysses. It proved interesting and revealed an unsuspected fact. Joyce apparently didn't speak Irish, although Ulysses itself was translated into Irish quite late, in 1984.

The visit to the library enabled me to button-hole Julia's husband Albert, who is a professor psychiatry at Harvard on a point that has often intrigued me: concept definition in psychiatry. I have always assumed that defining the concepts psychiatrists use must be a difficult problem in the absence of any clinical indicators. It seems I was only partly right. Concept definition is a problem but psychiatry gets round it by the use of agreed tests and expert consensus. That's hardly ideal and must leave significant room for uncertainty but it would seem to be a case of needs must. However, psychiatry is not depending on advances in clinical indications. I thought it needed better understanding of how the brain works but that turns out to be only partly true. As Albert pointed out, whilst we now know a lot more about areas of the brain that are active when we do certain things or experience various emotions, we still understand next to nothing about what exactly is going on in those active areas. Albert suggested that a much greater understanding of synapses will be needed before any progress is made on that front.

Friend Steve and I have agreed to give a talk some time next year on the origins of popular phrases and sayings. That leaves plenty of time to prepare but has already set me investigating sources and is proving an interesting way to spend otherwise unoccupied hours. One origin I have already found is that of the phrase “nineteen to the dozen”, meaning going all out. Apparently it derives from water pumps used in Cornish mines which were powered by coal and which, at maximum capacity, could pump out 19,000 gallons of water for every 12 bushels of coal consumed. A bushel, for those who left school after the 1960s, is an old volumetric measure of dry goods equivalent to 0.35 cubic metres.

Islam

I find myself with very mixed feelings about the anti-muslim sentiments that I encounter here, in England and among very reasonable friends. In some ways these sentiments are easily understandable given ISIS, Al Quaeda and cases of sexual violence, forced marriages, etc, hitting the headlines in the UK. Outrage must be the normal response for any westerner. My problem is that I understand that to be exactly the response that the extremist groups most want. They want a global war between muslims and the rest of the world and also, it would appear, between muslim factions. Outrage fuels the inferno they want to create.

At root, I can't see this as a struggle between muslims and the rest, as indeed some moderate muslim groups have said it is not or should not be. I see it as a naked struggle for power waged by groups who above all want dominance, want to be able to dictate to the world how it should live. That has happened a number of times in history; all that is new this time around is that Islam has been chosen to provide legitimacy and a constituency. If these groups simply said what they really want, total power, it would be easy to dismiss them; so they seek some form of legitimacy, to gain a following. I find it ironic that we label ISIS et al as mediaeval, which is indeed how their behaviour appears, when muslims in Europe in the Middle Ages were quite the opposite. In muslim-occupied Spain jews, christians and others, whilst excluded from holding office, were otherwise treated as equal citizens, an amazingly liberal approach for those days. When El Cid and the reconquest happened, muslims were offered the choice of conversion to christianity or death. And then came the Spanish inquisition............

The other serious conflict is clearly a clash of cultures which, I believe, has not been helped in England by extremes of political correctness. I firmly believe in tolerance but also that when there is a clash of cultures the predominant national (in this case English) culture must take precedence. And people of other cultures must accept that or face penalties or exclusion from the country. In 90% of countries in the world this would be automatically assumed and I see no reason why England should be different.

The Law

From Matera

My final outing in Matera stay was to the Benedictine Abbey of Michael Angelo in nearby Montescaglioso, nestling in the village at the top of a hill. Reception offered a guided tour, which we took; and just as well. Most of the interest, apart from the main building structure, was behind locked doors which had to be opened by the guide. There were some Greek ruins over which the monastery had been built, starting in the 5^th century and ending in the 12^th. The monks seemed to have lived a fairly plush life when there wasn't a war going on around, the cells being spacious and quite well furnished. I enjoyed the visit.

I was due to fly home on the Monday but the strike by Air France pilots (euphemistically called a “mouvement social” rather than a “grève”) threw a spanner in the works. I am wondering if this interesting change in nomenclature lowers the official statistic for the number of strikes in a year. “No, no, nowhere near 1000; only 300 in fact; the rest were mouvements sociaux or some such.” Anyway, a flight from Bari to Beauvais, a coach from there to the Porte Maillot in Paris, a taxi from there to Roissy and a train from there to Avignon where friend Steve picked me up did the trick, even if it did take 15 hours door-to-door.

I am tempted to express my feelings on Air France but find myself inhibited by a recent court case reported in the papers. A lady who had an unpleasant experience at a restaurant (poor food, service) related the same on her Facebook page, naming the restaurant. The restaurant sued her for defamation and won damages. The court verdict was not based on any inaccuracies in her account but simply on the fact that what she wrote had the potential to damage the restaurant's trade (and so it bloody well should!). Liberté? Whatever happened to freedom of speech in France? And how on earth do you do restaurant reports or critiques of anything else come to that? So all I can really say is that the return flight by Air France didn't go off wonderfully because it didn't go off at all.

Countering Terrorism

France looks as though it could be going to put its foot well and truly in it with a new bill to counter terrorism. The problem of protecting freedom from terrorism without adversely affecting that same freedom too much is well known. However, the new French bill, which proposes blocking websites with terrorist material on them, has obvious and serious flaws.

For one thing it makes a special case of material available over the internet. That's just plain stupid and a refusal to acknowledge lessons that have been learned elsewhere over the years. Material that may be illegal over the internet could therefore be legal if delivered some other way; anomalies here we come. The UK Sale of Goods Act (1979), designed to protect consumers, defined an economic good as something tangible, thus failing to protect consumers from bad services (or computer software). Similarly, the ancient Copyright Act (1911) specifically assumed marks on a page or similar, thus requiring a much later intellectual property rights act. That mistake could at least be excused by changing times and history but there are no excuses now. All media and means of delivery should be covered by any new legislation; surely that lesson must have been learned.

Secondly, and more importantly, although the bill refers to the already legally defined terms provocation and incitement to terrorism, Article 4 also cites justification (apologie) of terrorism. But the bill doesn't give criteria for when a justification should be considered noxious and blocked, neither does it propose a body to define and interpret any such criteria. An explanation, for instance, could easily be interpreted as a justification if someone wanted to take that view. That looks like a free hand for the government to block anything it wants for just about any reason, including any embarrassing criticism it could do without.

NB  I included accents and they have screwed up the text presentation somewhat.  Why can't Blogger deal with accents?