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Raymond Smullyan is a polymath and a great man. He is a philosopher, a logician, a mathematician, a prolific writer, a magician, a humorist, a poet and a pianist. In this book, first published in 1977, and first purchased by me in 1981, he praises the philosophy of Taoism, and applies it to modern life.
Taoism is a Chinese philosophy, expounded principally by Lao Tse and Chuang Tse, blending into Zen Bhuddism. Smullyan uses a gentle, subtle and humorous approach to persuading us to see and join the Taoist philosophy. He quotes ancient poetry and inserts poems of his own devising. It is not possible adequately to rehearse his text in a brief review – go an read the book, which will be a happy experience, I am sure. One of his techniques is to write dialogues, which develop into extended Socratic educative debates, and are most telling. His chapter 22 ‘Is God a Taoist?’ is a classic, for it is a brilliant dialogue between ‘Mortal’ and ‘God’, changing our views on many traditional Christian beliefs, such as whether or not we have free will.
One aspect of this book is its view of Nature. At the risk of a gross simplification, one could say that Taoism is about working with Nature, rather than controlling nature. ‘Nature’ is one of the trickiest words is philosophy and religion, admittedly. The ‘Tao’ is Nature. It is the life force. It is the universe and the way things are. You could say that the philosophy is about trusting nature, believing in its natural goodness, and the original goodness of human nature. This opposes the Christian belief in ‘original sin’. Lao Tse seemed to believe than man is fundamentally good, and becomes distorted and spoilt by restraint and too much stress on morality.
So Taoism, as expounded here, sounds like a ‘hippy’ philosophy – and indeed the picture of Mr Smullyan makes him look like a hippy. But do not be fooled, he has a brilliant mind, and I am sure you will like being guided by him, even if you do not agree with everything he says. Indeed he does not want you to agree with everything he says. Go with the flow.
Incidentally, there is a Western philosopher who came up with very similar conclusions to the Taoists, but by a completely different route. That is the Dutch-Jewish philosopher, Spinoza. By logic and critical thinking, he rejected much of the prevailing Jewish and Christian thinking of his time, and argued that God and Nature were inseparable – indeed they are one and the same thing. Since we are part of Nature, and Nature is everything around us, we are part of God and cannot be separated from him. The parallels are uncanny, and worthy of further investigation.
Friday, 29 January 2010
'Fooled by Randomness', by Nassim Taleb
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This is Taleb’s earlier book, which I read later. It addresses many of the same themes as ‘The Black Swan’ – indeed, the Black Swan metaphor is used and explored in this book. The title is quite self-explanatory: in judging human success we are frequently fooled by random effects. In many walks of life, people can just get lucky and then are wrongly regarded as being made of superior stuff. This is particularly true of financial traders and fund managers, to which he devotes a lot of time.
He is eloquent about the social interactions between the apparently successful and the apparently unsuccessful. A trader in dangerous emerging market bonds snubs his neighbour, who also works in finance, but does not earn so much – until the trader loses everything in a sudden market crash.
This book is a good complement to ‘The Black Swan’, since it covers different ground. In essence you can say here he focuses on the random roulette wheel of life and how to avoid being fooled by it, whereas in the other book he focuses more on the extreme tails of the frequency distribution of life that is created by that roulette wheel.
I think he would have felt more at home in the Middle Ages, with their fixation on the wheel of fortune, though he greatly enjoys laughing at and being enraged by the absurdities of modern life.
The unfolding appalling events in finance and the real economy make him an important prophet of wisdom. He wrote these books before the financial crisis, and is not just one of the cacophony of wise-after-the-event commentators now.
This is Taleb’s earlier book, which I read later. It addresses many of the same themes as ‘The Black Swan’ – indeed, the Black Swan metaphor is used and explored in this book. The title is quite self-explanatory: in judging human success we are frequently fooled by random effects. In many walks of life, people can just get lucky and then are wrongly regarded as being made of superior stuff. This is particularly true of financial traders and fund managers, to which he devotes a lot of time.
He is eloquent about the social interactions between the apparently successful and the apparently unsuccessful. A trader in dangerous emerging market bonds snubs his neighbour, who also works in finance, but does not earn so much – until the trader loses everything in a sudden market crash.
This book is a good complement to ‘The Black Swan’, since it covers different ground. In essence you can say here he focuses on the random roulette wheel of life and how to avoid being fooled by it, whereas in the other book he focuses more on the extreme tails of the frequency distribution of life that is created by that roulette wheel.
I think he would have felt more at home in the Middle Ages, with their fixation on the wheel of fortune, though he greatly enjoys laughing at and being enraged by the absurdities of modern life.
The unfolding appalling events in finance and the real economy make him an important prophet of wisdom. He wrote these books before the financial crisis, and is not just one of the cacophony of wise-after-the-event commentators now.
'The Black Swan', by Nassim Taleb
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This is an important book. All intellectual people should read it. It should be a set text – certainly for all business school students. The trouble is that business schools would have trouble accepting much of what he has to say. Furthermore, Mr Taleb is unrestrainedly outspoken, so that he almost seems offensive. In the first half of the book, I wondered what kind of egomaniac was keeping me company. BUT his erudition and his arguments (and his rough charm) gradually and firmly win through. By the end of the book, I simply have to admit that he is correct.
To admit that he is correct is intellectually like an earthquake, since it shakes down the towers of many things taught in our conventional education, not least business school itself. If you accept he is correct and then go on with your life as normal, then you have not fully accepted that he is correct. I personally realise that I have not internalised his messages and changed my way of thinking and my way of life. I am somewhat confused about the far-reaching implications of his arguments. I will have to read it again and contemplate, and then implement some changes. This almost sounds like a religious book!
So what is it about? A ‘Black Swan’ is his label for a highly improbable, but high impact event. It is an outlier; something beyond our regular expectations. So we do not think about a ‘black swan’ event much. We may not even know it exists. Our experience gives us no clue that it exists. We take a thousand balls out of a bag and find they are all white. Why would we expect a black ball? Our statistics, whether Pascalian or Bayesian, will not alert us to the possibility of a black ball. Then one day we draw out a black ball. All our previous experience is vitiated. Mr Taleb’s metaphor comes from Europeans seeing only white swans, and being astonished to discover black swans in Australia.
The metaphors of swans or balls in a bag do not capture well his other key point here. The ‘black swans’ have a high impact. Think of history. 9/11 was unexpected and had high impact. The First World War has unexpected and had high impact – to put it mildly.
Or think of your own life, and the unforeseen key events that changed your life for ever. They were not planned, but once they happened, everything changed. The person you met and married. The job you applied for and got, and the job you suddenly lost. Specifically I think of going to work in Japan, something not remotely contemplated 12 months before I arrived there. I also think of the thunderbolt of being diagnosed with Polycythaemia in 1994; or the stroke that might suddenly floor me as a result.
If you think in personal terms, the significance of ‘black swans’ comes home. Mr Taleb says forecasting is impossible in many circumstances. Planning often turns our to be futile. I would have been astounded to be told in 1978, as an English student at Oxford, that I would turn out to be a financial markets trainer in 2008 (having the effrontery to teach physics graduates financial maths!).
Mr Taleb seems to wander over all kinds of ground in this book, and you wonder sometimes what the relevance and point is. But it all comes together by the end of the book. For instance, he discusses fame at several stages of the book. We tend to idolise the famous. But how did they become famous? Are they really worthy of our adulation? Maybe they were just lucky. Maybe they just happened to be a touch ahead in talent, but then were swept up in the many ‘winner takes all’ processes of modern life. Are the footballers earning £10 million really 500 times better than a lowly footballer earning £20,000? Is the man on TV being heard by millions of people more worthy to be listened to than a mere teacher in a classroom? Was Admiral Nelson truly the greatest leader in the Royal Navy? And what about those who achieved great things, and have never been heard of? A stunning poem written in a book that is lost forever. A talented composer who never gets published? A man who prevents a terrorist outrage, whose name is never known to the public.
What has this to do with infrequent, high impact events? Everything. Many of the fortunate are the products of positive black swan events. Furthermore the luck element, or some self-reinforcing effect like academic peer review, leads to the domination of ideas which are simply weak or misleading – or should be more critically challenged, were they not coming from the mouths of such ‘famous’ people. When he is scathing of Nobel prize winners – especially those who won the Economics Prize – you at first think that Mr Taleb is being very disrespectful. Well he is. And when the scales fall from your eyes, and you see the unfair process by which Nobel prize winners are selected, you realise that Nobel prize are possibly not so worthy of our exaggerated respect. This is well explained by his description of social contagion.
Contagion and feedback loops are a large part of social phenomena that set them apart from pure science. He discusses the financial markets in several chapters, and firmly regards them as social phenomena, affected by human emotions and crazes. He rips apart the ideas of efficient markets and portfolio diversification and risk management techniques (all Nobel prize winning topics).
He talks a lot about ‘Mediocristan’ and ‘Extremistan’. He says we have to know which country we are in, and it is fatal to the search for truth and assessing risk to mix them up. He stores up positive venom for those who misuse the Gaussian normal distribution curve. It is a tool of Mediocristan. It can be rightly applied in the physical sciences and mechanical / chemical engineering fields. But he rages against it being used in the social ‘sciences’. Banks who assess their ‘Value at Risk’ with the normal distribution curve are telling us about the 99.9% confidence interval, which is actually unimportant. By their methods and actions they ignore the 0.1%, which is the Black Swan that changes everything. So they are not truly measuring risk, let alone thinking about it.
Finance is rich with black swans that come out of the 0.1% zone: the 1929 and 1987 stock market crashes; the Latin American Debt crisis of 1981; the collapse of LTCM in 1998; the collapse of Bear Stearns in 2008. Oh, they are all explained after the event. But we really did not forecast them and we really did not know the ultimate cause, any more than we know the cause of the First World War.
So we are urged to get away from the toxicity of Gaussian Curve thinking and to face the fact that many important distributions are highly skewed. Take wealth ownership for instance. Independently of this book, I have found statistics saying that 20% people own 83% of the world’s wealth. Furthermore an eye-popping 1% of people own 40% of the world’s wealth. The winner takes all – or so near to all that it hardly matters. We are talking about Extremistan here.
This is an important book. All intellectual people should read it. It should be a set text – certainly for all business school students. The trouble is that business schools would have trouble accepting much of what he has to say. Furthermore, Mr Taleb is unrestrainedly outspoken, so that he almost seems offensive. In the first half of the book, I wondered what kind of egomaniac was keeping me company. BUT his erudition and his arguments (and his rough charm) gradually and firmly win through. By the end of the book, I simply have to admit that he is correct.
To admit that he is correct is intellectually like an earthquake, since it shakes down the towers of many things taught in our conventional education, not least business school itself. If you accept he is correct and then go on with your life as normal, then you have not fully accepted that he is correct. I personally realise that I have not internalised his messages and changed my way of thinking and my way of life. I am somewhat confused about the far-reaching implications of his arguments. I will have to read it again and contemplate, and then implement some changes. This almost sounds like a religious book!
So what is it about? A ‘Black Swan’ is his label for a highly improbable, but high impact event. It is an outlier; something beyond our regular expectations. So we do not think about a ‘black swan’ event much. We may not even know it exists. Our experience gives us no clue that it exists. We take a thousand balls out of a bag and find they are all white. Why would we expect a black ball? Our statistics, whether Pascalian or Bayesian, will not alert us to the possibility of a black ball. Then one day we draw out a black ball. All our previous experience is vitiated. Mr Taleb’s metaphor comes from Europeans seeing only white swans, and being astonished to discover black swans in Australia.
The metaphors of swans or balls in a bag do not capture well his other key point here. The ‘black swans’ have a high impact. Think of history. 9/11 was unexpected and had high impact. The First World War has unexpected and had high impact – to put it mildly.
Or think of your own life, and the unforeseen key events that changed your life for ever. They were not planned, but once they happened, everything changed. The person you met and married. The job you applied for and got, and the job you suddenly lost. Specifically I think of going to work in Japan, something not remotely contemplated 12 months before I arrived there. I also think of the thunderbolt of being diagnosed with Polycythaemia in 1994; or the stroke that might suddenly floor me as a result.
If you think in personal terms, the significance of ‘black swans’ comes home. Mr Taleb says forecasting is impossible in many circumstances. Planning often turns our to be futile. I would have been astounded to be told in 1978, as an English student at Oxford, that I would turn out to be a financial markets trainer in 2008 (having the effrontery to teach physics graduates financial maths!).
Mr Taleb seems to wander over all kinds of ground in this book, and you wonder sometimes what the relevance and point is. But it all comes together by the end of the book. For instance, he discusses fame at several stages of the book. We tend to idolise the famous. But how did they become famous? Are they really worthy of our adulation? Maybe they were just lucky. Maybe they just happened to be a touch ahead in talent, but then were swept up in the many ‘winner takes all’ processes of modern life. Are the footballers earning £10 million really 500 times better than a lowly footballer earning £20,000? Is the man on TV being heard by millions of people more worthy to be listened to than a mere teacher in a classroom? Was Admiral Nelson truly the greatest leader in the Royal Navy? And what about those who achieved great things, and have never been heard of? A stunning poem written in a book that is lost forever. A talented composer who never gets published? A man who prevents a terrorist outrage, whose name is never known to the public.
What has this to do with infrequent, high impact events? Everything. Many of the fortunate are the products of positive black swan events. Furthermore the luck element, or some self-reinforcing effect like academic peer review, leads to the domination of ideas which are simply weak or misleading – or should be more critically challenged, were they not coming from the mouths of such ‘famous’ people. When he is scathing of Nobel prize winners – especially those who won the Economics Prize – you at first think that Mr Taleb is being very disrespectful. Well he is. And when the scales fall from your eyes, and you see the unfair process by which Nobel prize winners are selected, you realise that Nobel prize are possibly not so worthy of our exaggerated respect. This is well explained by his description of social contagion.
Contagion and feedback loops are a large part of social phenomena that set them apart from pure science. He discusses the financial markets in several chapters, and firmly regards them as social phenomena, affected by human emotions and crazes. He rips apart the ideas of efficient markets and portfolio diversification and risk management techniques (all Nobel prize winning topics).
He talks a lot about ‘Mediocristan’ and ‘Extremistan’. He says we have to know which country we are in, and it is fatal to the search for truth and assessing risk to mix them up. He stores up positive venom for those who misuse the Gaussian normal distribution curve. It is a tool of Mediocristan. It can be rightly applied in the physical sciences and mechanical / chemical engineering fields. But he rages against it being used in the social ‘sciences’. Banks who assess their ‘Value at Risk’ with the normal distribution curve are telling us about the 99.9% confidence interval, which is actually unimportant. By their methods and actions they ignore the 0.1%, which is the Black Swan that changes everything. So they are not truly measuring risk, let alone thinking about it.
Finance is rich with black swans that come out of the 0.1% zone: the 1929 and 1987 stock market crashes; the Latin American Debt crisis of 1981; the collapse of LTCM in 1998; the collapse of Bear Stearns in 2008. Oh, they are all explained after the event. But we really did not forecast them and we really did not know the ultimate cause, any more than we know the cause of the First World War.
So we are urged to get away from the toxicity of Gaussian Curve thinking and to face the fact that many important distributions are highly skewed. Take wealth ownership for instance. Independently of this book, I have found statistics saying that 20% people own 83% of the world’s wealth. Furthermore an eye-popping 1% of people own 40% of the world’s wealth. The winner takes all – or so near to all that it hardly matters. We are talking about Extremistan here.
'The ode less travelled', by Stephen Fry
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My friend Clem lent me this book at least a year ago, but I dared not use it properly, since Stephen Fry urges the reader to write in the book, such as marking up the stresses on samples of Iambic Pentameter. So I bought my own copy, and have been happily defacing it. I confess not to have done all the exercises he urges us to do, but I can come back to this book again and again. This is not the sort of book to sit down to read cover to cover. Indeed, it is a manual to turn us into poets, and so is a reference book and an inspiration to be used over time.
At this point I have not read it all. But I thought it worth reporting in my reviews now to praise Mr Fry. He is evidently a hugely intelligent person, belying the plumy image he sometimes conveys on TV. This book is startlingly original and he is the perfect person to write it. He has little time for the ‘inspirational’ approach to poetry, urging children to write down their feelings in free verse. I had that at school, and am actually grateful for it (thanks Mr Barton). However I now acknowledge that us schoolchildren were not taught the craft of writing poetry. Mr Fry is very old-fashioned in that respect, and you realise he is completely right. One needs to know the technical tools of any trade.
So he sets out to thoroughly educate us in Metre, Rhyme, Verse Form and Diction. My conscientiously reading this book you will be able to impress your friends with a knowledge of Iambs, Dactyls, Trochees, Enjambments, Rhyming arrangements, Terza Rima, Odes, Villanelles, Limericks, Sonnets, Haiku and so forth. Would you not be proud to identify those things, and even write them yourself. Mr Fry gives many examples from literature and gives many samples of his own poetry. He quietly but emphatically displays his huge knowledge, and does so with humour and modesty, that makes this book a pleasure to read.
My friend Clem lent me this book at least a year ago, but I dared not use it properly, since Stephen Fry urges the reader to write in the book, such as marking up the stresses on samples of Iambic Pentameter. So I bought my own copy, and have been happily defacing it. I confess not to have done all the exercises he urges us to do, but I can come back to this book again and again. This is not the sort of book to sit down to read cover to cover. Indeed, it is a manual to turn us into poets, and so is a reference book and an inspiration to be used over time.
At this point I have not read it all. But I thought it worth reporting in my reviews now to praise Mr Fry. He is evidently a hugely intelligent person, belying the plumy image he sometimes conveys on TV. This book is startlingly original and he is the perfect person to write it. He has little time for the ‘inspirational’ approach to poetry, urging children to write down their feelings in free verse. I had that at school, and am actually grateful for it (thanks Mr Barton). However I now acknowledge that us schoolchildren were not taught the craft of writing poetry. Mr Fry is very old-fashioned in that respect, and you realise he is completely right. One needs to know the technical tools of any trade.
So he sets out to thoroughly educate us in Metre, Rhyme, Verse Form and Diction. My conscientiously reading this book you will be able to impress your friends with a knowledge of Iambs, Dactyls, Trochees, Enjambments, Rhyming arrangements, Terza Rima, Odes, Villanelles, Limericks, Sonnets, Haiku and so forth. Would you not be proud to identify those things, and even write them yourself. Mr Fry gives many examples from literature and gives many samples of his own poetry. He quietly but emphatically displays his huge knowledge, and does so with humour and modesty, that makes this book a pleasure to read.
'Emma - the twice crowned Queen', by Isabella Strachan
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In my partially serendipitous way, I wandered into Piccadilly’s Waterstone’s on Wednesday 12th March to spend a little time, and picked up this biography. I have for a long time been interested in the history of England prior to the Norman conquest, and often browse this period of the history section of bookshops. I read the book rapidly – which is a good sign.
Emma was the wife and queen of King Ethelred (‘The unready’) of the house of Wessex, and later of the Danish King, Knut (also known as Canute). This is an extraordinary straddling of the two sides in the prolonged struggle for the control of England between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings. As Ethelred’s wife (1002 – 1016), she was on the losing side, as the country was progressively invaded. She was even forced into temporary exile with her young children, one of whom was Edward – who later became a king of England (known as ‘The confessor’). As Knut’s wife (1017 – 1035), she gave legitimacy to the Danish conquerors and made great efforts to heal the nation’s wounds by gifts to the church. She also gave birth to a son by Knut, called Hardeknut, who was king of England for a short time.
In both marriages Emma had to compete or co-operate with another wife and her children. This was an age when the church winked at an informal polygamy, so important was securing the blood-line of kings. Ethelred had previously married Elgiva, one of whose many children was Edmund (‘Ironside’) who fought the Danish invaders, and whose bloodline stretches down to the present royal family. Knut had previously had an informal ‘marriage’ with (another!) Elgiva (‘of Northampton), who gave him a son, Harold (‘Harefoot’) who also was king of England for a short time.
Confused? The dynastic struggles of the time were complex, but extremely important in determining the whole direction of subsequent English history. So it is worth studying this period in detail. I am always annoyed by the victors’ version of history which virtually starts at the Norman conquest, ignoring hundred of years of independent and interesting history.
However detail is something in short supply, unfortunately. Historians gave to glean information from a paucity of documents, with very little opportunity to cross-reference to establish the true facts. One could describe the known facts of Emma’s life in a short monograph – as my friend Tony Head once did. Isabella has to pad out the book with other facts and a huge dose of speculation. Note the frequency of phrases and words, such as “one can imagine”, “would”, “if”, “might have”, “would have”, “may”, “possibly” and “probably”, and one realises that very little can be relied on in this book.
I am not blaming the author, since this is an ineluctable problem with the history of the era. In fact she makes a good (though sometimes mawkish) attempt at adding colour and drama to the story. However there are many unqualified sentences, especially those telling us what Emma thought (!) which are novelistic rather than historical.
In my partially serendipitous way, I wandered into Piccadilly’s Waterstone’s on Wednesday 12th March to spend a little time, and picked up this biography. I have for a long time been interested in the history of England prior to the Norman conquest, and often browse this period of the history section of bookshops. I read the book rapidly – which is a good sign.
Emma was the wife and queen of King Ethelred (‘The unready’) of the house of Wessex, and later of the Danish King, Knut (also known as Canute). This is an extraordinary straddling of the two sides in the prolonged struggle for the control of England between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings. As Ethelred’s wife (1002 – 1016), she was on the losing side, as the country was progressively invaded. She was even forced into temporary exile with her young children, one of whom was Edward – who later became a king of England (known as ‘The confessor’). As Knut’s wife (1017 – 1035), she gave legitimacy to the Danish conquerors and made great efforts to heal the nation’s wounds by gifts to the church. She also gave birth to a son by Knut, called Hardeknut, who was king of England for a short time.
In both marriages Emma had to compete or co-operate with another wife and her children. This was an age when the church winked at an informal polygamy, so important was securing the blood-line of kings. Ethelred had previously married Elgiva, one of whose many children was Edmund (‘Ironside’) who fought the Danish invaders, and whose bloodline stretches down to the present royal family. Knut had previously had an informal ‘marriage’ with (another!) Elgiva (‘of Northampton), who gave him a son, Harold (‘Harefoot’) who also was king of England for a short time.
Confused? The dynastic struggles of the time were complex, but extremely important in determining the whole direction of subsequent English history. So it is worth studying this period in detail. I am always annoyed by the victors’ version of history which virtually starts at the Norman conquest, ignoring hundred of years of independent and interesting history.
However detail is something in short supply, unfortunately. Historians gave to glean information from a paucity of documents, with very little opportunity to cross-reference to establish the true facts. One could describe the known facts of Emma’s life in a short monograph – as my friend Tony Head once did. Isabella has to pad out the book with other facts and a huge dose of speculation. Note the frequency of phrases and words, such as “one can imagine”, “would”, “if”, “might have”, “would have”, “may”, “possibly” and “probably”, and one realises that very little can be relied on in this book.
I am not blaming the author, since this is an ineluctable problem with the history of the era. In fact she makes a good (though sometimes mawkish) attempt at adding colour and drama to the story. However there are many unqualified sentences, especially those telling us what Emma thought (!) which are novelistic rather than historical.
'On Chesil Beach', by Ian McEwan
McEwan is an eminent British novelist, a booker prize winner and the subject of a previous review on mine (‘Saturday’). This is a relatively slight work, both in its length and subject matter. It almost reads as an extended short story. The subject matter is an investigation of Englishness, within a narrow range of history (the early 1960s) and of social category – young middle class from Oxford and London.
The narrow focus of many English novelists disappoints me. And to what does this book amount? I can blow its key event, because it is trivial: the frigidity of a newly wed woman and the premature ejaculation of her husband. The attention to detail in describing their wedding night is clever and comic. It is not pornographic, but slightly voyeuristic. I did not find the protagonists particularly interesting, though they were skilfully put in context. I did not care that they did not see each other again after the failed wedding night, and felt indifferent to their fate.
The book does have a brilliant jewel at its centre, small though it is: their recriminatory conversation on the beach after the aforementioned ejaculation is intense and true-to-life. The unpremeditated flow of their emotions and the hurtful words they throw at each other define their lives from that moment on. The crux of the story is a moment of non-response when the man, Edward, lets her walk away out of sight forever, without stretching out a hand or saying a conciliatory, loving word. The inaction changes everything.
I think McEwan likes to write to capture these defining moments. But it does not matter much, in this case.
The narrow focus of many English novelists disappoints me. And to what does this book amount? I can blow its key event, because it is trivial: the frigidity of a newly wed woman and the premature ejaculation of her husband. The attention to detail in describing their wedding night is clever and comic. It is not pornographic, but slightly voyeuristic. I did not find the protagonists particularly interesting, though they were skilfully put in context. I did not care that they did not see each other again after the failed wedding night, and felt indifferent to their fate.
The book does have a brilliant jewel at its centre, small though it is: their recriminatory conversation on the beach after the aforementioned ejaculation is intense and true-to-life. The unpremeditated flow of their emotions and the hurtful words they throw at each other define their lives from that moment on. The crux of the story is a moment of non-response when the man, Edward, lets her walk away out of sight forever, without stretching out a hand or saying a conciliatory, loving word. The inaction changes everything.
I think McEwan likes to write to capture these defining moments. But it does not matter much, in this case.
'The English', by Kate Fox
This is an anthropological book on the tribe known as the English, purportedly explicating the ‘hidden rules’ of their behaviour. It is not in an academic mode, and is clearly pitched at selling good numbers to the public. The author tries hard to entertain and provoke, and ends up giving a fairly subjective view, which can hardly qualify as cool objective scientific research.
I found it repetitive. She has themes, which emerge repeatedly in examining different contexts, such as home, food, pubs, dress and so forth. The concluding chapter ‘Defining Englishness’ is yet another repeat, and offers nothing new. It has a diagram “of Englishness”, bringing together her theses in one flowing system. According to Ms Fox, the central driver is ‘Social dis-ease’. From this psychological core emanate ‘Reflexes’ (Humour, Moderation, Hyprocrisy), ‘Values’ (Fair play, Courtesy, Modesty) and ‘Outlooks’ (Empiricism, Eeyorishness, Class-consciousness).
This list does not do justice to the colour and humour of the many observations and anecdotes. Many of the comments are piercingly accurate – Pub culture is brilliantly explained. However she does not reflect on the philosophical problem of Induction – drawing conclusions from evidence. She makes generalisations which seem somewhat false, trite, conventional or just plain irritating.
Underlying the book is a journalistic need to paint the English as particularly weird and embarrassed by everything. This strikes me as exaggeration and inaccurate. I wonder if the English are really so special. It seems a kind of egotism – Ms Fox is herself English. What about the quirks of say the South African Dutch tribe? Also I wondered if many of the social phenomena she observes are really human universals. So I was somewhat disappointed, and judged the book lightweight.
At several points she likens the English to the Japanese. Indeed, I have long thought the two races/cultures have many mirror points. Since these are the two tribes I know best, maybe I am conditioned into thinking our quirks are normal human behaviour.
Still one can come away from this book with edification. Certainly observing one’s fellow human beings in an anthropological manner is highly entertaining.
I found it repetitive. She has themes, which emerge repeatedly in examining different contexts, such as home, food, pubs, dress and so forth. The concluding chapter ‘Defining Englishness’ is yet another repeat, and offers nothing new. It has a diagram “of Englishness”, bringing together her theses in one flowing system. According to Ms Fox, the central driver is ‘Social dis-ease’. From this psychological core emanate ‘Reflexes’ (Humour, Moderation, Hyprocrisy), ‘Values’ (Fair play, Courtesy, Modesty) and ‘Outlooks’ (Empiricism, Eeyorishness, Class-consciousness).
This list does not do justice to the colour and humour of the many observations and anecdotes. Many of the comments are piercingly accurate – Pub culture is brilliantly explained. However she does not reflect on the philosophical problem of Induction – drawing conclusions from evidence. She makes generalisations which seem somewhat false, trite, conventional or just plain irritating.
Underlying the book is a journalistic need to paint the English as particularly weird and embarrassed by everything. This strikes me as exaggeration and inaccurate. I wonder if the English are really so special. It seems a kind of egotism – Ms Fox is herself English. What about the quirks of say the South African Dutch tribe? Also I wondered if many of the social phenomena she observes are really human universals. So I was somewhat disappointed, and judged the book lightweight.
At several points she likens the English to the Japanese. Indeed, I have long thought the two races/cultures have many mirror points. Since these are the two tribes I know best, maybe I am conditioned into thinking our quirks are normal human behaviour.
Still one can come away from this book with edification. Certainly observing one’s fellow human beings in an anthropological manner is highly entertaining.
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