The Paradox of Industry

You may, if you care, which itself would grant you membership to a very elite group, have noticed that I haven't posted anything for a week or so. This has not been a contrived endeavour on my part, in fact it has been due to the absence of such an endeavour. I've discovered, since returning home a fortnight ago, an ungovernable torpor which has left me unable, unwilling, unwhatever to write much at all. As it happens, I decided quite some time ago to write about writer's block and I have, in a display of grandest irony, been unable to complete it.

Fortunately, an hour's perusal of Twitter generously endows one with ideas, and is as efficacious as anything you could care to mention in restoring my unfaith in humanity. This has gone some way in placating the gaping abysm of creative desolation into which I am happily lodged. Hopefully, therefore, I will be able to moan about something fairly soon.

But enough self-indulgence, I must apprehend the crux of this post. What I have found to be true in this span of unimpaired leisure is that industry is exponentially harmed by any gift of free time. I have always suspected this to be the case but my summer holidays affirm it. This may be a rule true only of myself, but this does not diminish its claim to being a rule. I find I will complete far more, write far more, enjoy myself far more, when all this is tempered by unpleasantness. I recall writing a lot during sixth form, from 1am onwards when I had to be up at 8am, which fact oppressed me greatly. It is only against the backdrop of something toilsome that leisure can be efficiently appropriated. Now I have no countervailing force against which I should rebel, and this somehow removes most of the point of writing anything in the first place. At university there is a kind of sour joy to be had from missing a day's lectures to relay a soldier's experience of how shit the whole arrangement is. Prioritising writing before coursework provided a similar simulation of sybaritism and debauchery. Now I am, as a teacher might remind me, only wasting my own time. Wasting others' is far more enjoyable.

I do not merely propose that excessive spare time reduces output per hour of spare time, but that it may reduce total output itself. Certainly I have done a lot less in the last two weeks than I usually might, but I've also strangely derived less pleasure from this. I do not much savour the hours I spend in my pyjamas, watching television shows that I would, under normal service, vomit at the sight of. I cannot understand why I prefer to do boring things than interesting things, when both are as accessible. A sort of anti-utilitarianism seems to reign in my head when I'm given enough spare time.

Clearly, though, this cannot be a universal truth - this would imply that less can be accomplished in an infinite time frame than in a nonexistent one. But I do think there is an optimal balance between work and leisure. Furthermore, as I described in my last post, a large amount of the creative output of the past few hundred years has been the progeny of a life of leisure. This said, we do not know what could have been produced had these idle writers been afflicted with greater hardship. I can create things when I have a lot of free time, but there is no sense of urgency.

I suppose it can be said that leisure is a great milieu for thought, but I find that too much leisure produces too much thought. Sometimes I envy the feral nonchalance with which an animal can drift through the world, programmed as they are merely to find the next meal. Human minds are like furnaces, things need to constantly be poured into them or they will collapse under their own ferocity. If the mind cannot deconstruct something external then it will look into itself and begin to mess around with levers and switches that are best left alone. A mind will eat an arm if it must do so to survive. Leisure gives too much time and too little to use it for. So too much leisure is bad in this respect.

Anyway, the point I wish to make from all this is: sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. Excessive leisure may not be quite so deleterious to others, but I find it removes any sense of struggle. I like being irritated, and this often compels me to do things I do enjoy, and this is not so viable when I am the cause of my own boredom (though I have made a good attempt at it in this post).

A Satyr against Reason and Mankind by John Wilmot

I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, Or anything but that vain animal, Who is so proud of being rational. The following is just an excerpt from this charmingly bitter poem by John Wilmot. The full text can be pursued with little exertion by clicking on the link which I will beneficently provide: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/mankind.html Were I (who to my cost already am One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man) A spirit free to choose, for my own share What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear, I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, Or anything but that vain animal, Who is so proud of being rational.    The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive A sixth, to contradict the other five, And before certain instinct, will prefer Reason, which fifty times for one does err; Reason, an ignis fatuus of the mind, Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind, Pathless and dangerous wand'ring ways it takes Through error's fenny bogs and thorny brakes; Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain; Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down Into doubt's boundless sea where, like to drown, Books bear him up awhile, and make him try To swim with bladders of philosophy; In hopes still to o'ertake th' escaping light; The vapour dances in his dazzling sight Till, spent, it leaves him to eternal night. Then old age and experience, hand in hand, Lead him to death, and make him understand, After a search so painful and so long, That all his life he has been in the wrong. Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies, Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise.    Pride drew him in, as cheats their bubbles catch, And made him venture to be made a wretch. His wisdom did his happiness destroy, Aiming to know that world he should enjoy. And wit was his vain, frivolous pretense Of pleasing others at his own expense. For wits are treated just like common whores: First they're enjoyed, and then kicked out of doors. The pleasure past, a threatening doubt remains That frights th' enjoyer with succeeding pains. Women and men of wit are dangerous tools, And ever fatal to admiring fools: Pleasure allures, and when the fops escape, 'Tis not that they're beloved, but fortunate, And therefore what they fear, at heart they hate.

I only discovered this poet a while ago, but I consider myself fortunate in having done so. He was a contemporary of the more famous Andrew Marvell, and was a courtier of Charles II's court during the Restoration. His full title was John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. As it happens, he rather impressively died of venereal disease, and a play attributed to his name is called Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery, which I think is a staggeringly good name. What I find so fascinating about him though, and this seeming contradiction is evident in this particular poem, is that he was writing in the Enlightenment era but seems to write in a completely Romantic fashion. Many would attribute the beginnings of the Romantic era to Blake but perhaps John Wilmot is a candidate. I noticed quite soon that Wilmot refers to man as a 'vain animal'. Byron would later refer to man as 'man, vain insect!'

Wilmot espouses so many Romantic shibboleths in this poem that you would be forgiven for thinking it was written 200 years after it was. There is the love of nature, the rejection of reason, and the propulsive device of subtle misanthropy that is so characteristic of writers such as Byron. There are so many quotes I could isolate to aid me in this conclusion, but this is perhaps the most potent:

'His wisdom did his happiness destroy,

Aiming to know that world he should enjoy.'

These are complaints that writers such as Poe would later express. In fact, in Poe's Sonnet to Science, Poe writes (if I remember correctly): 'Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,/Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?' He then goes on to write about how mythology, fantasy and frivolity are crushed under the weight of reason. This is the sort of point Richard Dawkins faces on a regular basis - people ask him questions such as 'Doesn't religion give people a more palatable view of the world?' and he will reply very astringently with 'You may prefer it, but that doesn't make it true. Besides, science is infinitely more fascinating.' Part of me does agree with this, and science is fascinating, but recourse to fantasy can be salubrious to the troubled soul. Part of me wishes I could be so constructed as to believe simpler explanations of the universe. Diplomatically, I think a synthesis between reason and instinct should be encouraged - it would be terribly dull to live every waking moment in a very matter-of-fact way, but it would be an affront on man's potential and the splendour of nature to spend all of one's allotment in a chrysalis of ignorance. This is one reason I dearly hope religion is not completely eradicated by atheism. Even Christopher Hitchens, an antitheist, admitted this - it is the struggle between reason and fantasy that drives man to the better construction of each. 

I hope that was not too great an excursion. In short, I think this is a very important poem. Apart from this, though, it is impeccably written. 'Reason, an ignis fatuus of the mind,' must be one of my favourite lines of poetry. It is possibly the shortest summary of the Romantic movement I have encountered. I can almost overlook the massive injustices inherent in the aristocratic, feudal nature of the times if the aristocracy were producing writing like this (I'm not sure the composition of the country is too different now, however.) Bertrand Russell makes the point in In Praise of Idleness that most of humanity's philosophical, literary, mental advances have been as a result of the leisure afforded to the wealthy, though this is not a recommendation for an unencumbered minority but an unencumbered majority. The unjust wealth of kings brought hundreds of years of feudal oppression, but it also brought incredible writing, music and architecture that would probably never have been produced under today's capitalism.

Wilmot makes it clear that these chains of reason are of man's own construction, reminding me of Blake's 'Mind-forg'd manacles'. 'Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain' is a great quote that exposes man's departure from nature. The final line of the poem, not included above but equally frandibulous is 'Man differs more from man, than man from beast,' the point being that artificial ideology and such removes us from our natural state. I just adore this poem. Read the full thing and bask in its brilliance.

Returning from University

I vowed to never mention my own personal circumstances on this blog, or at least never to employ them as the basis for an entire post, but I am about to flaunt this rule, I'm sure enraging the thousands of readers who eagerly follow my impersonal posts in the process. This blog post is a necessity because, as I believe is a common phrase among today's youth, I am presently desirous of a bitch.

Well I've finished my first year at university (I must take a minute here to assail an annoyance - why must people write 'University' with a capital letter? But then I suppose we do all go to School and visit the Library and use the Toilet. I find the whole affair rather sinister - University gives the impression of a grand international institution bent on world domination, which aspiration I'm not sure I advocate. If I wrote that I'd just returned from the Cupboard the absurdity would be immediately conspicuous. The capitalisation would suggest that the cupboard was some sort of significant figure in the house, who might dispense Kit-Kats only upon the pursuance of the cupboard's whims) and I'm thoroughly underwhelmed. I'm going to write something more comprehensive, and have begun to do so, but I'm not entirely sure whether I'd like to post it yet. Coupled with this is a sort of authorial constipation which currently haunts me, under whose tyranny I either produce nothing or something which Gillian McKeith might turn her nose up at. The mere presence of words in this blog post indicates which camp this prose occupies.

There is something - to me at least - terrifying about moving to or from university. I don't like the change of scenery as much as my mind tells me I ought to. Disequilibrium reigns for the first few days and then an irrepressible dolour sets in, regardless of the direction of the journey. It seems I am able to lament the loss of the positive aspects of the dwelling I have just vacated, but not consider the forgone negatives. However disgruntled I am in the one location, and it is usually just a question of how disgruntled, moving serves only to exacerbate my disaffection. After this it is a process of becoming inured to my surroundings until I must be unearthed again. The result is that I am reluctant to ever engage in translocation.

Furthermore, it's sickeningly hot and my sympathies are largely with the poor people who inhabit a country hotter than ours. My dislike for the sun has been variously attributed to vampirism, reclusiveness and natural contrarianism, but I don't think there's anything that difficult to comprehend. Summer is the season of sweat, of discomfort, of people being nauseatingly happy for no reason but that the nuclear reaction in the air is incinerating us at a quickened pace.

I now have four months in which to languish in my house, and I feel more than ever an urge to seek employment. The sad truth, however, is that I cannot see myself exerting any energy in acquiring a job.  The idea of being a serf is unappealing enough, without the added mortification of having to beg for it.

Anyway, this really has been a pointless ramble, partly committed in order to prove I'm still around and partly for my own selfish purposes. More poetry when I'm feeling perky. Good riddance.

An Attempt at Seriousness - Ed Miliband's out of the austerity closet

I don't know whether I should be posting about politics and economics on a blog largely centered around poetry and foppish pursuits, but perhaps the superior quality of the bitter prose which follows will impel your heart to political activism. Or not. But anyway, perhaps don't read if you're offended by politicians' perennial ideological vicissitudes.

I just read this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22785282 with, perhaps not horror, but surprise at how Ed Miliband has made the inadvertent admission that his party has no unique view on anything.

This article describes how 'Ed Miliband is to promise to cap spending on social security so that a future Labour government can "turn the economy around".' Well this to me is tripe of the most gaudy fashion. He should have stood up, bashfully announced that we should just listen to the Conservatives because they have the exact same view with a more competent bunch of administrators, and then sat down (preferably on a piece of dog superfluity).

The article also notes that 'Mr Miliband will say only people who pay in to the system for more than two years should get jobseeker's allowance.' Fantastic. We have a huge youth unemployment problem and now it's going to be even more difficult for them to ever escape the tyranny of their querulous parents. Presumably the people with no filial benefice are going to be left to wither on the pavement like old bananas (it's 4:50 am, please don't judge the failings of my metaphor.)

The thing that irks me about this article is that it indicates, as I already was quite aware, that nobody has a clue how to get rid of the deficit, but they can't bring themselves to make a confession. What happened to Labour's 'too far, too fast'? Now it seems they're trying to beat the Conservatives in the austerity race. This is not particularly consonant with a public image as strong-willed and resolute. This article makes it clear that Labour has no real plan on how to improve growth (which should be the real aim, but more on that ahead), and certainly nothing even redolent of a coherent plan on reducing the deficit.

Furthermore, and most disregarding of the value of the people of this country, this statement brings with it the idea that even Labour now sees the elimination of this omnipresent deficit - a mere number - as more important than the welfare of real people. What the hell happened to neoliberalism? Well, that can be explained. Voters see public debt as the same as their own debt - something that must be prioritised before everything else. This should not be true of the government - it can pretty much borrow indefinitely at a very low rate (the Bank of England at the moment buys huge amounts of government bonds (almost wrote 'bongs'). Admittedly it's not allowed to buy them directly from the government but the effect is much the same.)

So should we borrow more to spend more? I have no idea. In 20 years we will probably see Keynesianism as the thing which didn't help us out at all, but this will be largely because it wasn't tried. But really though, nobody can tell whether it is profligacy or frugality that will deliver anything even remotely resembling a recovery. All that we do know is that the Great Depression was banished by a huge boost in public spending due to WW2. I don't think there is any great evidence to support austerity's efficacy in such a case. Keynes famously said that it doesn't matter what the government spends money on - it can spend it on paying people to dig holes and fill them up, this will still bring employment and consumption, a virtuous cycle and all its related boons.

In my opinion, we're going to carry on spending less and less, reducing the size of the economy, and the debt to GDP ratio will grow, and is growing. I'm not sure we can shrink our way out of recession. Politicians are restrained by popular opinion, and this explains why the Milipede is moving towards appeasing a vogue for governmental asperity; the public seems to have developed sadistic tendencies. But I'm not even sure there is no support for a Keynesian plan of action - austerity has conspicuously done, to coin a phrase, shit all, and public disaffection is rising, particularly since the downgrading of the UK's AAA credit rating by two of the big three ratings agencies. The Conservatives must be creaming themselves at Labour's support of austerity - there is no alternative economic plan to which voters can flee. The political parties have become homogenised like milk. All the Conservatives need to do now is prove they can win on competence, which they certainly do. The Labour Party should honour its more Keynesian sympathies if it is to retain even a semblance of consistency.

The Dream by Lord Byron, Part 1

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, 
A boundary between the things misnamed 
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world, 
And a wide realm of wild reality, 
And dreams in their development have breath, 
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; 
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, 
They take a weight from off waking toils, 
They do divide our being; they become 
A portion of ourselves as of our time, 
And look like heralds of eternity; 
They pass like spirits of the past -they speak 
Like sibyls of the future; they have power - 
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain; 
They make us what we were not -what they will, 
And shake us with the vision that's gone by, 
The dread of vanished shadows -Are they so? 
Is not the past all shadow? -What are they? 
Creations of the mind? -The mind can make 
Substances, and people planets of its own 
With beings brighter than have been, and give 
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. 
I would recall a vision which I dreamed 
Perchance in sleep -for in itself a thought, 
A slumbering thought, is capable of years, 
And curdles a long life into one hour. 


OK, this poem is incredible. I was very tempted to end the blog post there but I don't have much else to do, so ramble I will. This is only the first part of the poem, from nine in total. I was considering including the whole thing but it is probably slightly too long for a blog post. 

One thing to note about this poem is that it is very uncharacteristic of Byron to write in blank verse, he was a staunch defender of rhyming verse. He said of Milton's Paradise Lost that, ‘I am not persuaded that the Paradise Lost would not have been more nobly conveyed to posterity, not perhaps in heroic couplets – although even they could sustain the subject, if well balanced – but in the stanza of Spenser, or of Tasso, or in the terza rima of Dante, which the powers of Milton could easily have grafted on our language.’

Actually it seems Byron rather enjoyed criticising established greats of poetry, though of course he was entirely entitled to do so. He said of Shakespeare that: 'Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales. That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny: but this was all.' This seems rather severe but honestly there is nothing terribly factually incorrect here. It is Shakespeare's masterful use of language that immortalises his works more than the stories themselves.

Anyway, I must leave now, I require a cold shower after reading that poem.

Killing Badgers

If you want to irritate me then by all means tell me that something as offensively idiotic as a badger cull is taking place. From today, 1st June 2013, farmers are free to shoot badgers in two trial areas. I am tempted to suggest that badgers should, in response, henceforth be allowed to shoot farmers. We could pay mercenaries to dress up in badger costumes and besiege farmhouses across the country with medium to heavy artillery. Whilst this all sounds rather enjoyable, the reality is a thing of sterility and gross disrespect for the land which supports us. Thousands of badgers will be killed as a rather twisted experiment. The aim of this is to reduce the spread of bovine TB, which badgers can carry.

Here is a rather good link to a BBC Q&A on the cull: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22614350

The article mentions that badgers are a protected species, and indeed they are. The following is taken from http://www.rspca.org.uk/allaboutanimals/wildlife/laws/badgers :

'Under the Protection of Badgers Act 1992, in England and Wales (the law has been amended in Scotland) it is against the law to:
-Wilfully kill, injure or take a badger.
-Cruelly mistreat a badger.
-Dig for a badger.
-Intentionally or recklessly damage or destroy a badger sett – or obstruct access to it.
-Cause a dog to enter a badger sett.
-Disturb a badger when it is occupying a sett.'

So what is effectively being proposed is that it's illegal to kill one badger but fine to kill tens of thousands. This is simply stupidity. If memory serves, it is also illegal to kill humans in this country, and we should not treat the neglect of this law as more abhorrent than neglect of the protected status of badgers, simply because it might mean that we ourselves become imperilled in the first case but not in the second. This is pure selfishness. The government is, implicitly, saying that some laws are more binding than others. The following statement could be made in Parliament and would present no inconsistency with what is being proposed: 'We feel it is so important to protect badgers that we have enshrined it in law. And by the way, we are going to kill thousands of them from June 1st.' Regardless of your opinion on the ethics of it, the inconsistency is clear. I await the day when we are told children are to be culled for spreading head lice, or the homeless are to be culled for worsening the appearance of our streets, or that anyone with bird flu is to be immediately killed to reduce contamination. This is all as nonsensical and unjustifiable as killing badgers because a minority may spread a disease. 

Something else that really irks me about this is that it's so driven by commerce, but commerce should have no place in the state of our natural surroundings. Badgers have no monetary value to anybody and so there's nobody to defend them. This is why protesting and making a general fuss is so important. Economics largely delivers the most socially accepted state of affairs, but this is not true in cases such as this. We attribute more of a non-monetary value to the presence of badgers in the country - they are a part of the wildlife and are a necessary part of the food chain too. We gain a sense of enjoyment when we see them on the television going about their badgery existences. But farmers don't care about this. The monetary value of badgers is as much as we would pay to keep them, but this does not involve farmers. The badgers would certainly not be killed if they produced some saleable product but, as they don't, no farmer has an interest in saving them. Similar parallels can be drawn with the situation in Africa with poaching (of animals, not eggs) - locals have no interest in defending many species, but reward people for preserving wildlife and poaching falls very quickly. This is a sad fact but one which must be acknowledged. I think it is unfair to approach the eradication of so many animals with such levity merely because they have no monetary value. In fact, this is precisely why the government should be against this policy - it is the only party that can resist the markets' need to pursue profits at all costs. The point of the government is to make sure things like this don't happen - to keep the private sector in check. Otherwise they have no purpose. Such gross dereliction of duty is one thing that really angers me.

The aforementioned BBC article goes on to discuss scientific evidence relating to this cull, writing that

'Scientific evidence suggests sustained culls of badgers under controlled conditions could reduce TB in local cattle by 12-16% after four years of annual culls, and five years of follow-up, although it could be lower and it could be higher.'

Personally I do not believe even great success could justify the extirpation of a huge number of badgers, but as a cost-benefit analysis, the following may be incisive. These culls are aiming to destroy at least 70% of the badger population in each zone, and for that, at a cost of millions, and 9 years of timewasting, they can expect a 12-16% fall in bovine TB in each area! How is this even slightly appealing?

More damning still are the other findings mentioned in the article:

'The randomised badger culling trial in England found that killing badgers disrupted their social groups, with surviving animals moving out to establish new groups, taking TB with them. This perturbation effect led to an increase in cases of bovine TB outside of the cull zone, although the impact diminished over time.'

Now this is where I get really pissed off. Not only does the government take the killing of thousands of badgers so lightly, it  does so with no solid scientific evidence. I could at least understand the reasoning behind a cull if there was clear evidence to suggest that it will help to eliminate TB in cattle, but this is not at all upheld by science. In this 'randomised trial' reactive culling, i.e. culling in response to an outbreak, had to be 'suspended early after [a] significant rise in infection.' So we may spend millions of pounds, and waste a lot of time, only to find that we've gained a gargantuan pile of badger corpses and a bigger bovine TB problem. To undertake mass slaughter on such spurious scientific grounds is doubly loathsome. This money should be spent on developing a vaccine instead, not on recourse to medieval solutions (which give the appearance of action whilst actually making the problem worse).

What does this cull say of our regard for our wildlife? We have no compunction towards the idea of killing thousands of defenceless creatures for modest to no gains. Indeed, the effect may be negative (although in my opinion, overall the effect will be negative regardless of the effect on local bovine TB levels). What price scientific inquiry? What price our responsibilities as the only reasoning creature? What price the law if the government can break it on a whim? I detest this policy.

I happen to think that these 'e-petition' things are a token gesture to a powerless populace, but nevertheless I signed the petition at http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/38257

Also have a look at http://teambadger.org/ for more information.