Spiked, December 23, 2018

Nietzsche: an explosion in thought
Sue Prideaux has written a fine biography of this most misunderstood of thinkers.

The TLS, April 13, 2018

Paul Anthony Jones
THE CABINET OF LINGUISTIC CURIOSITIES
A yearbook of forgotten words
384pp. Elliott and Thompson. £14.99.
978 1 78396 358 4

The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities by Paul Anthony Jones, a compendium of obscure and obsolete words, is designed to be read at a rate of one entry a day, with each word connected to the date under which it appears. For example, “pseudandry”, the use of a male pseudonym by a female writer, appears on November 22, the birth date of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Elsewhere, “antimetabole” (the repetition, in a transposed order, of words or phrases in successive clauses) comes on January 20, the date on which, in 1961, John F. Kennedy said:“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”.

The most rewarding way to approach this book is to guess the meaning of the word before reading its definition. It is thus an ideal companion for etymology enthusiasts and aficionados  of  other  languages,  ancient  or  modern.Jones cites  many words  coined in  the  eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the fashion for taking or creating words from Latin was at its height. Examples include “supervivant”(a survivor), “transmural” (situated beyond a wall), “singultus” (hiccup) and “breviloquent”(pithy  and  succinct  in  speech).  Elsewhere, from Ancient Greek, we have  “epistolophobia”  (the  fear  of  receiving correspondence),“arctophile” (a collector of teddy bears) and“crapulence” (a feeling of sickness caused by overeating or drinking).

Italian  readers  will  recognize  “abbozzo”,meaning  first  draft,  which  was  directly imported in the nineteenth century, and many will discern the French origins of “alamodic”, aseventeenth-century word meaning extremely fashionable.  Spanish  speakers  will  immediately detect that “cacafuego” signifies some-thing  unpleasant.  It  was  a  sixteenth-century term for a blustering braggart.

There is a lot  of  entertaining  trivia  here.Under “basiate” (to kiss) we learn that kissing was banned in England on July 16, 1439 to prevent the spread of plague. The Arctic is named not after the white bears that live there, but after the Great Bear constellation that is so prominent in the northern night sky. We also learn that cellophane and laundromat were once proprietary  names  (see  “anepronym”,  a  trade-marked  name  that  has  come  to  be  used generically). Jones might have added “heroin”to that list. And there are legions of euphonic words that might also have deserved inclusion,such  as  “ingurgitate”  (to  swallow greedily),“rubiginous”  (rust-coloured)  or  the  now archaic “to ostentate”. That fricative, staccato verb resonates so much more forcefully than“to show off”.

PATRICK WEST

The TLS, February 23, 2018

Sam Leith

WRITE TO THE POINT
How to be clear, correct and persuasive on the page
280pp. Profile Books. £14.99.
978 1 78125 476 9

The culture wars of the past sixty years have been fought in many fields, and on the matter of the correct way to write English, the battle still rages. There remain today the linguistic conservative prescriptivists, such as Simon Heffer and Lynne Truss, who believe that the rules of English must be obeyed. Facing them are the liberal descriptivists, such as Steven Pinker and Oliver Kamm, who say that the language should be allowed to evolve, and that many “rules” of grammar are merely conventions and needn’t be adhered to. (These conventions include not ending a sentence with a preposition.)

Sam Leith presents himself as lying between the two camps. His approach in this guide to improving your English is pragmatic. The most important thing when it comes to writing is to make friends with your reader, so how you write depends on who you are writing to or for. The prohibition on the split infinitive is indeed nonsense; English infinitives aren’t directly comparable to  Latin ones, which literally can’t be split. But a potential employer reading your CV might object to them – or to your using “disinterested” where you meant “uninterested”, or “like” instead of “such as”, or starting sentences with “but” – and interpret those usages as signs of a lazy, careless mind. “Knowing your audience is always more important than knowing a set of rules and prohibitions”, writes Leith. This is an eminently sensible approach.

Some may find Leith’s section on grammar somewhat forbidding, especially the part about verb tenses and moods. (Counter-intuitively, the best way to learn English grammar may well be to learn a foreign language, preferably a relatively uncomplicated one such as Italian. This teaches you what every word in any sentence is doing.)Leith’s advice on writing short, crisp sentences is sound, as is the reminder to read more. He excels especially on the importance of cadence and euphony, in making your prose sing. This, too, will endear you to your reader - and it is something that Leith achieves in this first class guide.

PATRICK WEST

The Catholic Herald, March 9, 2018

Truth be told, it's easy to mislead

Patrick West on the dangers of careless reading

Truth: A User's Guide
By Hector Macdonald, Bantam, 352PP, £20


Don’t be put off by the title of this book. At first glance, you could be forgiven for assuming that it was about “fake news” or our “post-truth” society – fashionable tropes that have come to dominate political discourse. Nor is this book concerned with a more long-standing question: is all truth relative, and is your truth as good and valid as mine? You will find no postmodern philosophising here.

Rather, Truth: A User’s Guide accepts from the outset that some things are facts and others are falsehoods. But it contends that what truth you accept or assert depends upon your point of view, upon which truth is useful to you, and which truth you would prefer to accord to your point of view.

For example, in 2015, both of these statements would have been true: “A teacher on a salary of £28,000 is earning below the average income”, and “A teacher on a salary of £28,000 is earning above the average income”. Both are true because the first statement is based on a mean average income that year of £31,000, the latter on a median average of £22,400.

Or consider, elsewhere, the fact that Canada and Australia have the highest rates of kidnapping in the world. Their figures are higher than those of Mexico and Colombia – but only because their governments included parental disputes over child custody in kidnapping statistics. Similarly, Sweden has the second highest incidence of rape in the world, because Sweden has one of the broadest definitions of rape. 

There are many competing truths out there, writes Macdonald, and it falls to us to discern how real facts can become misleading truths through various means.

Statistics can notoriously be used to mislead. The author reminds us to be wary of graphs where the Y-axis doesn’t begin at zero – these are always designed to exaggerate falls or drops in numbers. Also, beware those who proudly declare that the “Royal Family costs you just 56p a year”, rather than £35.7 million per year to the taxpayer; or those who boast that the Government spends just 0.7 per cent of GDP on overseas development assistance. This latter figure, in 2016, amounted to £13.3 billion, more than we spend on universities or the police.

We should also think twice when using GDP figures as barometers of happiness, particularly in our digital age. A car share app or a free dating site increases the sum of a nation’s happiness, but neither will add a penny to GDP. 

Meanwhile, a natural disaster or you breaking your leg in a motorcycle accident will increase GDP figures, as a consequence of reconstruction programmes or the incurred cost of ambulance travel, insurance claims and the purchase of a new motorcycle.

Truths are concocted in other ways. One is through the misuse of language. In 2013, the housing charity Shelter put out a press release with the headline “80,000 children facing homelessness this Christmas”. The word “homeless” evokes images of people sleeping in cardboard boxes on the streets, but Shelter was using the word in a more redundant, literal sense, referring to children dependent on temporary accommodation arrangements by their local government authority, usually in a B&B – ie not living in their own “home”.

Another example of how a truth can mislead – deliberately or otherwise – is by confusing correlation with causation. Take the well-known truth that left-handers have a shorter life-expectancy than right-handers, based on a study in 1991 – a truth that suggests that life is more perilous in a world built for right-handed people. Before the late 20th century, it was common to force left-handed people to become right-handed. Only in recent decades have people described themselves as left-handed. In short, because most left-handed people these days are on average younger, they are also recorded as younger on average if they die.

This confusion between correlation and causation was brought into relief in January, when a report in the Sun said that people called Mohammed were more likely to be quoted higher car insurance than people called John – a report which didn’t relate that men called John tend to be far older than men called Mohammed, and likely to live in suburbs or the countryside.

Not everyone is out deliberately to deceive us. Macdonald says that there are three types of communicator: the Advocate, who simplifies facts to communicate a positive message; the Misinformer, who passes on dubious truth by accident; and the Misleader, who does so on purpose. 

Each chapter concludes with advice on how to spot those using suspect means, but also on how to get your own truth across successfully in the eternal battle of competing varieties. Truth: A User’s Guide is not so much just a handbook on how to spot misleading truths as a field guide in how to propagate your own. 

Such a Machiavellian work is what you’d expect from a strategic communications consultant. Nonetheless, it’s an illuminating, judicious and lucid affair. It will surely change the way you read the news and see the world. 

The Catholic Herald, April 1, 2016

The TLS, February 19, 2016

The Catholic Herald, October 16, 2015

The Tablet, October 10, 2015

in The Tablet, September 19, 2015

in The Catholic Herald, May 5, 2015

in Spiked, April 10, 2015

It’s time Brits got down with the Lingo

in Spiked, February 23, 2015

Spiral: the cure to Scandimania

So long to another sweary series of this balls-to-the-wall French drama.

                 

                      

                  

in spiked, January 16, 2015

Night at the Museum’s nod to Philip K Dick

This film really is family fun, with a bit about what it means to be human.

in spiked, November 27, 2014

Turner: Sordid man, sublime art
Timothy Spall is outstanding as the artist who invented modernism

in The Catholic Herald, October 24, 2014

 

Poseurs, frauds and pseuds have taken over philosophy

 

The elegant writers of old are gone, says Patrick West. Now philosophy is full of exhibitionist gobbledygook

Philosophy at 3:AM

by Richard Marshall

OUP, £20

What’s the point of philosophers these days? Not much, if you ask your average lay person or journalist. Philosophy, most of us would say, has become arcane, obscure, too technical and trivial. Such a perception was made manifest during the notorious Alan Sokal hoax of 1996, when the scientist concocted an essay of pure gibberish and successfully submitted it to an academic journal. It seemed to confirm the view that modern philosophy has become obscurantist, and a repository for frauds and pseuds.

 

It’s this impression that Philosophy at 3:AM seeks both to explain and to redress. Based on the cultural/literary website 3ammagazine.com, it’s a collection of question-and-answer interviews with 25 contemporary philosophers of all hues, from metaphysicians and logicians to ethicists and linguists.

 

The cry that “philosophy has become too obscure” is akin to “the young are badly behaved” or “our language is becoming debased” – it’s ancient and eternal. Sure, modern analytical philosophy can seem overly technical, and the continental variety can veer into exhibitionist gobbledygook. This appears especially so when you compare both schools to the beautiful literary philosophy of yore: Camus, Freud, Nietzsche, Rousseau. 

 

But there has always been dry, technical philosophy: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hume’s Treatise, Aristotle, Aquinas and Hegel. As the America metaphysician Eric T Olson argues here: “Philosophy is hard. That’s its nature. No one would expect serious works of physics or mathematics or economics (as opposed to popularisations) to be immediately accessible to intelligent readers with no training in the subject. Why should philosophy be any different?” Philosophy at 3:AM thus emerges less as a book on philosophy than one about it. And here lies a problem – or perhaps the problem. 

 

I’m not sure a lay reader would want to read a book in which philosophers talk about their own discipline. Such navel-gazing only seems to reinforce the perception that philosophers are out-of-touch. This collection is thus a symptom of the problem it’s trying to address.

 

The use of the impersonal female pronoun from the outset is a case a point. When speaking hypothetically, I would prefer an alternating “he” or “she”, or even a “s/he”, to a question-raising, flow-stopping impersonal “she” and “her”. Keep it simple: the first rule of good writing. There is also the name-dropping. “Philosophical enquiry,” asks one philosopher, “is that the sort of thing Aristotle and Hume were doing, or the sort of thing that Kripke and Gettier were doing?” The last two are hardly household names. Add to this, the often sycophantic tone of the interviewer: “Your ideas blow away many so-called radicals such as Foucault, and your conclusions, couched in very cool, precise language, belie their corrosive impact...” Yuk!

 

It’s a pity, because if you persevere, there is much interesting matter here. Patricia Churchland suggests that moral behaviour preceded religion by 200,000 years and religions evolve into monotheism – yet Confucians, Buddhists and Taoists continue to live without deities. 

 

While Gary Gutting rightly derides Derrida’s writing as needlessly obscure and repetitive, he defends him as a serious and valuable philosopher. The meaning of words are forever unstable, and we shouldn’t be afraid to accept this. Brian Leiter dismisses Derrida as a “poseur”, while standing up for Foucault, who diagnosed how “individuals in the modern era become agents of their own oppression”. To be sure, Foucault belongs to the category of seductive literary philosopher, but it was Freud who first truly elaborated how people internalise rules, becoming the oppressors of themselves.

Eric T Olson explores the Theory of Forms using the tale of Theseus, the mythical king of Athens who builds a ship and goes to sea. He occasionally returns to port to replace the ship’s worn pieces until eventually every one of them has been exchanged. In the meantime, the local museum has been collecting the cast off pieces, which it manages to assemble just as they were when Theseus first set sail. So there are now two ships: the repaired ship at sea and the reconstructed ship in the museum. Which of the two is Theseus’s original ship? Olson concludes that both are.

 

Michael Lynch regrets the rejection of objective truth in modern philosophy. “It is not just a metaphysical mistake; it is a political one,” he says, while Graham Priest delves into motion, contradiction and paradox: “For something to be in motion is not for it to be in one place and one time, and another at another, but at one and the same time to both be and not be in a place.” It can indeed be difficult to resolve place and movement: this is why prepositions are so different and difficult in foreign languages (in Italian you say you are “at” a city, irrespective of whether you are going there or situated there; and you say you are “in” a country whether you are heading or actually there). 

 

Finally, Eric Schwitgebel asks why professors of ethics slam doors, talk rudely during presentations, leave behind rubbish at their seats – and why among university libraries, textbooks on ethics are stolen more than the average.

 

This is all very interesting, but it’s also very bitty. What could have been a good book is ruined by its presentation in a deeply unsatisfactory format.

in The Catholic Herald, September 12, 2014

 

The Iron Duke needed a little help from his friends

 

Patrick West on a book that shows that Britain actually had a rather minor role in the great Battle of Waterloo

Waterloo

By Gordon Corrigan

Atlantic Books, £30

 

A common complaint made by First World War historians is that our perception of that conflict has become distorted by Blackadder Goes Forth. This was the 1980s comedy that reinforced the poets’ narrative that it was a needless and horrific conflict conducted with great incompetence and callousness. Yet Blackadder was equally guilty of reinforcing another stereotype: that of the Duke of Wellington being an aloof autocrat. In Blackadder the Third, set in the Regency, Stephen Fry interprets Arthur Wellesley as a overbearing bully who enjoys thrashing his servants and duels with canon (“only girls fight with swords”), and whose guiding principle for leadership is to “shout, shout and shout again”.

 

We have read and heard much about the First World War in this centenary year. No doubt we will hear much about the Duke of Wellington – and Napoleon – next year: the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo. So it is timely to deflate some of the common misconceptions surrounding the Iron Duke and the battle itself.

 

Far from being the bellicose boor of Stephen Fry’s incarnation, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was a cautious and conscientious figure, who was willing to be at one with his troops on the field of battle. “He planned meticulously and well understood the importance of logistics, of being able to feed, house, tend and transport an army,” writes Gordon Corrigan in Waterloo: A New History of the Battle and Its Armies. Wellington was a calm, methodical leader, and it was his consequent victorious track record in Iberia that had won him the position as head of the Anglo-Dutch army. 

 

Corrigan is eager to puncture another illusion: that Waterloo was essentially a British victory. The British were actually a minority in the Anglo-Dutch coalition of 110,000 men, which in turn was smaller than the 117,000 Prussian force. The Russians were to provide 150,000 and the Austrians close to 300,000, but by the time both were close enough to take part the fighting was over. Britain’s main contribution was £5m and the Royal Navy’s blockade. And at Waterloo, were it not for the late arrival of the Prussians under Field Marshal Blücher, Napoleon might have triumphed. 

 

So how did this victory come to be perceived as a typically British affair? Hindsight and subsequent Anglo-German relations, argues Corrigan. The year 1815 marks the start of the British Century and the last throw of a French imperial era. Between the two world wars of the next century, and after the second, there was little incentive to credit the Germans with anything. Most books on Waterloo after 1945 were allegorical. In writing of the gallant, outnumbered and outgunned British holding the foe until the last, before defeating the mighty dictator and thus saving the world from tyranny, they actually spoke of a much more recent conflict.

 

Waterloo is not all historiography. Far from it. It’s an old-fashioned romp, in which the emphasis is on detail, tactics and character rather than theory or grand narrative. The lack of primary sources will disappoint the more rigorous reader and orthodox historian. But as this book is primarily a yarn, it doesn’t really matter.

 

Inevitably, the author compares and contrasts Napoleon and Wellington. Both were born in the same year in peripheral parts of their nations. Both were the product of feckless fathers and domineering mothers, and rose through sheer ability and minimum of patronage. But here the comparisons end. In contrast to the prudent Wellington, Bonaparte was a gambler and opportunist who was careless with the lives of his troops. 

 

Corrigan doesn’t, however, cast the battle as a simple duel. Blücher emerges not merely as a first-rate leader, but also as the most colourful of the three commanders: “A quaffer of copious quantities of gin and brandy, Blücher would swig coffee, munch raw onions and smoke a huge meerschaum pipe as he rode along”. 

 

We later learn of Blücher and Wellington’s first encounter after victory. With both generals on horseback, Blücher threw his arms about Wellesley then kissed him. We also discover that only 10 per cent of British officers had been commissioned from the ranks. The bulk of officers were of the middle classes, educated at grammar schools and the sons of professional men. More revealing still is the number of English and Irish Catholics in the British Army, making up 20 per cent by the time of Waterloo. This preponderance was due to the anti-Catholicism that had been institutionalised in 1688. 

 

While the ban on Catholics joining the Army was lifted in 1741, they were still debarred from holding any “office of profit under the crown”. But this wasn’t enforced in the Army, as long as they didn’t make ostentatious displays of their faith. As a consequence, the Army became one of the few outlets for a Catholic gentlemen. This legacy continues today: in 2012 Catholics made up slightly more than eight per cent of the population but 20 per cent of Army officers. So much for disloyal papists.

 

More sensitive readers might flinch at the passages on amputation, while perhaps the most appalling disclosure is that riflemen deliberately picke out drummer boys. They were deemed so important because when shouted orders were drowned out by ambient noise signals were given by the beat of a drum. 

 

The Battle of Waterloo is further demystified when we read of looters on the field in its aftermath. Wounded men who tried to resist thieves had their throats slit. 

 

Corrigan’s manner can be a bit gruff. There is a non-sequitur complaining about the RSPCA and a breezy comment about the French soldier’s predilection for rape sits uneasily. His use of “England” to mean Britain is felicitous to historical usage, but it’s just plain wrong to the modern ear. Nevertheless, Waterloo is a hugely enjoyable, illuminating and very gory read.

in The Catholic Herald, July 11, 2014

 

 

The year that propelled Britain into the future

In 1846 the country was on the cusp of modernity, but have we really changed that much, asks Patrick West

 

Penny Loaves & Butter Cheap, Britain in 1846

BY STEPHEN BATES

HEAD OF ZEUS, £25

The recent European elections highlighted a significant divide in this country, of that between London and the rest of England, between a liberal metropolitan class and a UKIP-voting middle-class and lower-middle class uneasy with mass immigration and the European Union. We had grown accustomed to the notion that Britain was becoming an ever more disparate country - what with the spectre of Scottish independence - yet now there was the realisation that London is a very different place to the rest of England, what with its moneyed aristocracy and low-paid workforce from overseas.

As Stephen Bates new publication, 1846, explains, there was a comparable conflict between an uncouth bourgeoisie and a nobility in the mid-part of the 19th century - one that pitted the landed gentry against uppity northern industrialists. If debate today often centres on the influx and movement of people, in the 1840s it was the importation of food, and more specifically, corn. The new industrialists sought free trade and the end to tariffs - the Corn Laws - in order that their workforce eat more cheaply, while landowners strove to resist any change that would be detrimental to its already increasingly precarious position.

The passing of the gentry's power to the industrialists is one many themes in Bates's snapshot of the year 1846, when Britain was at the height of the Industrial Revolution, and on the cusp of modernity. And its a testament to the author that he has managed to make the Anti-Corn Law League debate interesting, so sullied is its reputation (in my eyes) by history lessons of yore.

The collision between old and new money took many forms. Many aristocrats, such as the "prickly and self-righteous" Lord Ashley, later Lord Shaftesbury, were of a highly moral, evangelical persuasion. Disgusted at the new "Millocracy" they believed that factories subverted and destabilised the social order, and actually exploited the workers, unlike the paternalistic aristocracy. There was also the belief that they were inimical to Christianity, and promoting godlessness and even Papism.

Yet, some industrialists could be just as paternalistic-minded. Bates takes the example of the Ashworths of Bolton, who at their cotton-spinning factory provided workers housing, holidays and education, while paying them sufficiently high wages so that their wives didn't have to work. In return, they insisted on cleanliness - a change of shirt twice a week - attendance at church or chapel every Sunday, sobriety and sexual morality.

If the 1840s was marked by a rise in evangelicalism in Britain, it was also a distinguished era for the High Church and Catholicism. It saw the emergence of the Tractarian movement, which sought to return the established Church to a more ascetic, pre-Reformation manner, and the rise of skilled polemicists such as John Kebel, Edward Pusey and John Henry Newman. This phenomenon was met with suspicion and hostility by evangelicals, and when Newman or any person of note converted to Catholicism, there was generally outrage among the Protestant clergy and press.

Anti-Catholicism was still part of every-day discourse in 1846 (although, in England, it would start to wane hereafter), with cartoons in Punch depicting sly and devious papist priests, or treacherous Oxford undergraduates wearing papal tiaras. And England would have its last anti-Catholic spasm in 1850 with the restoration of Roman Catholic bishops to England, an outburst aggravated, as Bates observes, by Cardinal's Wiseman ill-judged call for the reconversion of the country. The Times, true to form, called it "one of the grossest acts of folly and impertinence which the court of Rome has ventured to commit since the crown and people of England threw off its yoke."

The Protestant Ascendancy had already been incensed by Prime Minister Robert Peel's proposal to increase the grant to the Catholic priests' training seminary in Maynooth, outside Dublin. He had done this in order to win over the rural clergy in Ireland, a country that was suffering dreadfully in 1846, its potato crop having failed for the second year in a row.

From the outset there were plenty of graphic reports in the press as to what was happing in Ireland and urgent appeals from both British and Irish observers; one curate in Mayo wrote "No language can describe the awful condition of the people... They are to be found in thousands, young and old, male and female, crawling the streets and on the highways, screaming for a morsel of food." But for the most part, reaction to the famine from London was one marked by "callousness and ineptitude... managerial infancy and amateurish competence". Matters were made worse when the Whigs - who believed in the iron laws of laissez faire economics - were voted in in the summer of 1846, stopping all emergency imports.

The evangelical Charles Trevelyan, placed in charge of Irish affairs, had been taught by Thomas Malthus as a schoolboy. He couldn't even be stirred when a delegation of Anglican clergyman got down on their knees to beg for relief to be sent to Ireland in 1846. "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated," he said. "The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people."

The book 1846 is a splendid achievement, and befitting of a journalist, the author has an eye for the big picture. He includes sections on overcrowding in burial grounds, life expectancy (38 for a rural labourer, an astonishing 15 for a labourer in Liverpool), the railway bubble and subsequent crash, the toleration of prostitution (it was thought a better alternative to having unwanted mouths to feed), Mendelssohn's incredible popularity, church attendance (less than 50 per cent) or the fact that the first murderer tracked by train was a Quaker. Just as we are still in the midst of a transformative technological revolution, 1846 was a year in which the old wrestled with the new.

in spiked, June 23, 2014

Quelque chose pour Le Weekend
Sandwich’s French-themed festival highlighted those who embrace the modern world and those who do not.

in spiked, June 2, 2014

Mark Steel: the music-hall socialist

There’s something refreshingly old-fashioned about this left-wing funnyman.