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.