Botanist on Alp

Furious affections

2012-01-18T10:58:00.008+02:00

Thinking back to more tumultuous times of my adult life I am struck how little we change in some respects: love is an almost constant, no matter the age group... I'm now in much contact with very young persons, and though there is an immaturity there, in most, there is also a maturity that comes from the very fierceness of the feelings. Once again, or maybe actually only too rarely, I am reminded of my own luck: I never would have thought that I would turn out to be lucky in such central matters... Anyway, youth is a kind of an automatic immunization against non-fierceness, non-furiousness - it's no good to advice, and I don't, but the young surely would do well to remember that it is only too possible to lose that immunity with age ("the only enemy"). But if they do find love, and surely many will, they will keep their connection to the essential and not lose it in the routine triviality of daily life.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

2012-01-05T13:45:00.007+02:00

Yeats is - Yeats is one of the wonders of the Western world... I believe literature is the most humanity has ever achieved: really, all we pretty much have to show for ourselves are our books, and now that we are slowly but surely distancing ourselves from literature, are we not regressing? This thought came to my mind once again as I was delighting myself in R.F. Forsters great, great biography of Yeats.

It is very hard to characterize Yeats - of course, one can say, and I have, that he was completely dotty, disconnected, and he was, but that's actually almost totally misleading: he was very, very shrewd even in his dottiness (and compare that with Pound's quite pathological version). He was no politician, no idealogue, and that he knew - in some ways he really knew himself. And the poetry: light of evening, Lissadell... It's quite something, quite something else, and equally hard to characterize. I often find myself ambivalent: it's no ancient dusty tomb, it engages, enrages, delights, one of the wonders of the Western world.

And that is really what we have to show for ourselves, as much civilization as we have ever had: art, literature. Increasingly unimportant things.

But it still goes on

2011-12-31T18:11:00.001+02:00

I believe I have mentioned how important an experience it was for me to read Paul Fussel's Great War and Modern Memory in my early 20's just having arrived to study in Helsinki. It was more a personal and literary experience at the time, an esthetic experience of the combination of literature and history and personal life, a theme ever since very important for me. But as the years have progressed the First War has become ever more central for me as an historical event in its own right, as a central event directly in our own continuum. It still does go on: our civilization has been largely shaped by that catastrophy and the one that shortly followed, and in many senses we are shell shocked survivors from those two twin collapses of the progressive and optimistic West. There is not much trust, confidence in non-material things any more here: wealth is our strongest support and main reason for action.

Another year ends this evening, and I wonder whether my sense of a new constellation being on its way is correct or whether we just will struggle on, untransformed.

A shining city in a trough

2011-11-22T12:21:00.002+02:00

In these past few years I have read various books on the George W. Bush administration's policies concerning Iraq and Afghanistan (the latest, the dry, academic, devastating study of Afghanistan by Tim Bird and Alex Marshall). The blindness, the pride, the ideological hubris of those years is beyond belief. The decadence: if you wield great power, you have great responsibility over people's lives - if you take decisions that will mean life or death for hundreds of thousands, for millions, you are then obligated to be extremely well versed, well adviced (and intelligently critical and questioning of your advice) about the people whose fates you will affect. The moral and intellectual corruption of that administration is mind shattering, dispiriting. It is the clearest sign yet of the end of the American empire, this decadence, this casual ignorance of that president and his advisers.

Those were the times that were

2011-11-18T13:52:00.003+02:00

Helsinki in November must be one of the most dismal places on earth: rotting leaves, darkness, subdued, tired people hurrying to get indoors, no sign of winter, of clear freezing air and snow reflected light. A moment in history too, as all moments are, this one surely better than most: no physical lacks, no war, silly, shortsighted elites certainly, but, more or less, that's what elites always are. (To be fair, this time Brussels cum Berlin seems to be outdoing itself in stupidity - no Lord Keynes around now, and these elites wouldn't listen anyway.)

Well, I should concentrate on other weightier matters, only this is not a time for concentration, November in Helsinki. Some years have earned their right to feel nostalgic about. Today I found myself bringing to mind one such... This is not to say that I would have regrets about this one: I have found my place, my voice - living life recklessly, to the full, seriously. But at times seriousness is not all you need. Not in this November.

Kaks naist, üks pilet ja pliaats ja paber

2011-10-03T08:04:00.002+03:00

It is amazing, stunning how bad the trash media is, how reactionary, utterly supporting the existing structures while constantly working to make them even worse. This is surely no corporate conspiracy, as many on the left seem to think, any conscious, co-ordinated effort. It's much worse: it is how our society works, how it functions.

We have reached here, and will reach further, by taking small, relatively rational steps. There never was, or only briefly was, any deliberate awareness about the social democratic compromise, how satisfactorily it functioned. And it did, for a while. Now we are sliding, essentially randomly, towards something else - something that certainly does not seem to be as rational, as fair or as embracing of as wide social competition as possible.

There is no rational, calculated counter-force to this because that's not how our society works - there is also no rational, calculated effort to make things worse. Just human nature and ever unpredictably changing historical structures. Who knows where we will end, maybe at some stage we'll grow up and into rational control, but at the moment there is no control, only passion and short sightedness.

Love in a cold climate

2011-09-27T08:38:00.006+03:00

Going through this dismal rainy fall morning was rewarded by an image of Turing entering mathematics in the 1930's Cambridge ("second only to Göttingen" in those times, according to Hodges' classic scientific biography, a classic biography - it hardly gets much better than that). That pure world independent of twisted human constructions, certainly fitting to Turing always so destined to be at the receiving end of that twistedness.

Not that I would really know whether that assesment of mathematics is totally true: that door has always been closed to me (maybe I have gotten occasional glimpses of glimpses of it), our human world, as twisted as it mostly is is, has been the centre of my interest, along with the process of experiencing it. But, I do suppose, suspect that it really is wholly independent, good that something is.

Art cannot do that, isn't that, but art does something similar, only in a radically different way. Extremes meet. I suppose I remain where I once began this blog (in the midst of a positively biblical decade of challenges): not far away from G.E. Moore and Principia Ethica - love, friendship, art, science, these are the long views, the constants.

θάλαττα! θάλαττα!

2011-09-23T18:06:00.004+03:00

I still vividly remember reading in my early teens in the 80's John Fowles' magical description of the Greek landscape in "The Magus". Far in dismal north, in dismal circumstances such strange places were imagined. The merciless light, the stillness of Greek air, the awful, amoral brightness of the decidedly non-Nordic azure sea, the sense of the beauty of it all - the amazing power of literature (no film can ever be made, no place visited that would make justice to human imagination).

Such contrasts in that burning, painful life, such places visited ("only" in imagination, it is incomprehensibly said). But not only a half-forgotten private memory: ever since there has been an interest for antiquity, not Roman or Hellenistic, but for the brief, wild explosion of classical Greece. It is a central place, a central era for us, even now.

The strange inheritance

2011-09-21T09:41:00.003+03:00

There is really much in us that has come via Jerusalem - our vague, christian-agnostic humanism is basically just the New Testament translated into secular society. (In my personal case the connection is of course much stronger coming directly from a background of living, if very liberal, Christianity.) Liberalism, in the end is not a very Greek value. (And we don't hold it in the Greek way, but tepidly, half-heartedly.)

But the basic modern situation: freedom, passion, emptiness, is quite pure Athens. Not that many really would confront it. Some problems do arise in connecting liberal humanistic values with this Nietzschean condition of being in the world, but to my mind there is nothing inherently impossible in achieving a rational balance.

Art also is very a Greek thing - especially in the form where esthetics are seen as fusing with ethics (a view very close to my heart). Art is the central thing, next to it love and justice. Perhaps that is the fusion, our common inheritance - increasingly wasted inheritance, I suppose.

These recollections, echoes are indeed quickly fading. And not only of Athens but of Jerusalem as well, and there is a certain Roman luxury and opulence in our lifestyle, a certain decadence. One does wonder what is to follow all this, what rough beast.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

2011-08-20T19:52:00.002+03:00

I admit I do see the present-day USA as largely a decadent society. This does not come from any traditional European anti-American world view - the USA has been indispensable for the preservation of the Western world in the last 100 years. Its leadership would even now be indispensable for the West. But there doesn't seem much energy left, only a dysfunctional, corrupt political system and ethically and intellectually failed elites.

I have been re-reading the excellent Battlecry of Freedom (in the Oxford American history series), and even though it was a bloody, violent era, there was also an unmistakeable austere, ethical, forceful spirit in the nation. There was corruption, naturally, and ethical collapses, but also a strong, intense and serious will to progress and reform. Of course we do still have intensity, awfully misplaced, intellectually corrupt intensity in the various right wing groups, but that seems more a symptom of a steep decline than a sign that there hasn't been much decline.

Oh well, I'm inclined to pessimism in any case and as regards the future only an open mind is a completely rational view: we cannot know what signs will prove to be significant and which won't, but certainly a depressing spectacle, this exhaustion.

What do you see my blue-eyed son?

2011-08-18T08:10:00.004+03:00

I guess it is telling of my character that now having children, having experienced such intensity of affection and love, having seen such innocence and vulnerability that I don't think about the wonderfulness of the world but about the awfulness of its scope. How almost anything can happen, how there are no safety nets below us, below them.

I am not suited to this age in the sense of feeling like Donne: no person is an island - the awful, the crazily cruel things have already happened to us, are happening to us. A hard rain's a-falling right now, it has always been falling.

But of course this doesn't make the love, the innocence meaningless but only more meaningful, desperately meaningful. Our experience is a wild experience, as sharp, as real as it gets. It's an awful inheritance, but not only awful.

Introducing history into physics

2011-07-29T14:49:00.006+03:00

It is not often that books outside literature and the study of it concern quite directly with my major preoccupations - but Philip Ball's Critical Mass does exactly that. Of course, it does not really offer even rudimentary approaches for the actual study of history, but surely natural science is the direction where the much needed paradigm change will eventually come. Actually, Ball's approach probably corresponds quite exactly to sociology, but I suspect that the kind of statistical understanding that goes for gaseous molecules will not do for humans - the particulars are too important for the overall state of affairs. But surely we will once be able to posit a functioning physical model of historical change and be rid of the current tools far too crude to capture any certain connections between historical occurences.

Maybe this sounds, even now, over-ambitious and mechanistic, nevertheless I have never been able to fathom the distinction between physical and human sciences. It is just that human affairs have been much too complex for the natural sciences that have been more gainfully employed with simpler matters, such as the origins and structures of the universe etc. Perhaps we are now, at long last, developing sophisticated enough tools for the natural sciences to engage with our own experience...

The same old druid

2011-07-03T23:38:00.004+03:00

For some reason the Finnish expression "sydämen maisema" sounds much more authentic than its English translation "a landscape of the heart" which has an odd literal feel to it. In any case there are places - should one be so lucky - that stay disproportionately sharp in mind, in memory. Places that somehow retain their original magic and thus distort time: strange, strange places.

I visited one such place this weekend, and can't really here make full sense of the experience: how 28 years vanished and became heightened, how one could hear very distinct echoes of long since passed words in the summer night, young voices over the still waters. How not much had changed: due to its nature this river had kept its name particularly well.

I cannot really regret my path, at all, apart from a universal sense that we all ought to, in this fallen world. But back then I could not take all in that was so generously on offer, and there is a certain sadness in recognizing this. But for the circumstances I took much in, and that place, those people did stay and do stay in my heart, sharply etched.

Shakespeare

2011-06-30T21:11:00.004+03:00

It is a strange feeling to read even high quality literary criticism about the Bard. I have not yet encountered an approach that would make full justice to that scariest of writers. I don't think I'm romantizing him at all: he is as universal, as comprehensive as we have gotten to be in this civilization. And he was writing in the very beginning of it. Of course there is the period aspect, surely, but there is also that intimidating distance from it, that space. I have never had very intelligent things to say about him: he just doesn't leave much room for breathing. Something quite out of the normal scope of human discourse.

Some people left for heaven without warning

2011-05-29T18:19:00.006+03:00

I guess it's a sign of age (and of maturity) to be shaken about people aruptly leaving for ever who once were thought, if thought spesifically at all, to be permanent. We have a strange stage, a brutal stage for our brief stay here, however beautiful, breath taking the vistas. I wonder if we will ever be able to respond to these eternities, to this borderlessness with the seriousness it requires. (Of course it doesn't only require seriousness.) A strange experience this, a strange journey. So, one more farewell in this off-hand fashion. No paying nothing back, but I guess it was never expected, never calculated to be a trade.

Dynamics of radicalism

2011-04-29T07:50:00.004+03:00

We have now had in our recent elections interestingly a very slight whiff of actual radicalism. The "True Finn" party as a whole is more a renewal of our venerable rural populist party SMP just in somewhat more urban circumstances, and not really remotely radical in a serious way. But they do have a Southern metropolitan and fairly educated wing that is a relatively nasty, polarizing force somehow getting energy from the pitifully few immigrants from culturally more distant countries that we now have in Finland. This is probably neither here nor there, a passing phenomenon (Western populations getting to terms with globalization), but it got me thinking about circumstances where the centre does not hold, where liberal democracy is either weak or non-existant.

I myself go instinctively for the extreme middle way, aiming to cohere, construct, approving of messy, pragmatic compromizes, rational dialogues. These reflexes are the fundamental base of our Western liberal democracy. The true radicals, on any issue, aim to polarize, to weaken the centre, to disrupt the rational discourse. If they are weak, it is them who are marginalized, if they are strong enough, it's the rational centre that gets marginalized. Terry Eagleton characterizes liberalism as an ideology that would seek a compromize between fascists and non-fascists, but that's deeply unfair and misleading. Inherent in liberalism is a distrust of passion and fanatism, a lesson learned from our bitter historical experience that rational dialogue must not be extinguished. A radical for me is a person who in the fight against fascism chooses Stalinism, or vice versa. It is the extremes that get hard to distinguish from each other, never the centre.

Tea, anyone?

2011-03-31T13:11:00.003+03:00

I am not hugely interested in party politics. It's mostly surface froth anyway and these days absolutely divorced from any high ideals of citizenship and collective responsibility. (I think there was a period when the situation was noticeably better though that's probably a controversial opinion - but there was a moment, I do believe, when it was seriously thought that participatory politics mattered.) Still, there is a sort of groundswell coming in Finland with our version of the Tea Party (angry, not highly educated middle-aged men) rising remarkably in the polls. Much misdirected anger and rage fuelling the "movement". We have so few immigrants that it is quite an acrobatic achievement to create a huge national problem out of them. I guess it is something manageable, something tangible that you can understand and do something about it. The real problems seem to be so far out of the citizens' hands that it's easier just not to see them. In the end it will probably not amount to much anything. An opportunity once again lost - we would need real reform of the political process and social structures in general, but this wave of populism will likely not establish any and will probably make this real reform even more difficult. Oh well.

Dies irae

2011-02-20T11:14:00.009+02:00

I have been delighting in the majestic language of James Baldwin in his Collected Essays. It is almost always an exceptional treat to read non-fiction by great fiction writers. Most of them seem to have an automatic knack how not to write in bad language. In great contrast with academics - especially academic literary critics (odd, but there you are). Baldwin certainly writes great prose, but that's only one aspect of the essays - the language fuses with the thinking: the thoughts and the medium they are expressed in fuse (this must surely be true of all great writing). I don't know much about Baldwin, I'm sure the private person is different from the public writer, probably less likeable. I don't much care - here he takes painful issue with American racial tensions (always at the heart of the republic which should never be forgotten) and African-American experience not in a particularist way, but in a universal way (which universality can only be reached through particular experience, particular circumstances). I am supposedly a very rare thing, a white liberal without personal historical guilt, but I am a Burkean liberal after all. We should remember the particular awful, unspeakable things done in the past, being done today, but they are fundamentally universal failings, humankind's failings. Our failings.

The History Boys

2011-01-16T20:46:00.002+02:00

Even while watching the opening scenes I was wondering whether I should really enjoy the movie - it was very obvious, from the opening scenes, that I would. But it was not wholly indulgent and not wholly sentimental. There were genuinely good bits there. Apart from the various buttons of mine that it very expertly happened to push. Sentimentality is one of the worst sins, if not the worst, and much loved by Hollywood (and West End and Broadway). Indulgence is the invariable companion to it: things too pretty, solutions too easy, all sugared by cheap sentiment, sugaring it in turn. You can of course err in the other direction as well with too easy cynicism, killing all emotion, all sympathy. A narrow path to negotiate. Anyway, history is a curious beast - and we curious pray (but we are not only pray). This state of affairs was not totally hidden by the movie, so I think my enjoyment was permissible after all...

Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa (thrice)

2011-01-07T14:12:00.003+02:00

I'm sure Tom Stoppard has been amply punished by the academics for the glittering of his language. You cannot fundamentally be a serious writer if your text is madly funny and witty, and if you time comic dialogue like an angel. That's unserious. I am currently re-reading Arcadia - have seen it only once, a very polished Gate Theatre performance in Dublin - and it never ceases to amaze how well someone can write. Stoppardian wit, seriousness and language correspond very closely with my own esthetic ideals - it's very liberal art, very liberal concerns. It's not all there is, naturally, but through his skill, through his language Stoppard surpasses such limitations, and easily, effortlessly approaches universality. That is how it should be done. And there's a deadly seriousness in it.

Come senators, congressmen

2010-12-03T13:26:00.003+02:00

I believe much of the Obama administration's strange, even tragic inefficiency would be explained if he actually were centre-right instead of slightly centre-left as he was portrayed in the campaign. What lately used to be moderate Republican stances are quite identical to his apparent thinking and reflexes. This would then be at the core of this wasted opportunity: a system so broken that it does not appear reformable, it no longer lets serious reformers through. We'll see how far the wave of current Republican madness will reach. Surely some kind of a transformation will eventually occur, as this money-infested, decadent system won't be capable of self-correction. Strange, unpleasant times.

Reminiscences

2010-12-01T08:52:00.008+02:00

It is strange how the past appears to us: as series of sharply recollected moments against a more general background of imprecise atmosphere. I have had reasons lately to recall a past conversation that for some reason has been etched very clearly to my mind. The words do echo through the still time. I was 18 at the time, and frozen. I was debating with a pietist friend about praying, I was already then a vague pietist-agnostic, not really much concerned with God, but still vehement on this issue. My friend had said that he would certainly pray for example in the case of a loved one being seriously ill. I disagreed very strongly: I would not beg for what is right. A question of pride then, largely. I thought I knew sorrow but I only knew pain; I was frozen and burning at that time, flaming ice. Now melted for many years with just vague memories of that all-pervading hurt. But not without sorrow.

Along the narrow path of grace

2010-11-04T12:15:00.006+02:00

I was born in the middle of high-minded liberal Protestantism - and when it comes to stakes in high-mindedness there are few traditions, if any, to compete with liberal Protestantism. Luckily in my case it was much softened by the mysticism and radical existentialism of Finnish Pietism as high minded and as liberal as it is. It was handed on with love and acceptance (and in this we were luckier than the earlier generations), along, of course, with the unreal beauty and longing of the Pietist folk melodies. One can hardly think of better inheritance or one more at odds with the realities of our human world. Of course, there are many things besides sorrow here, but there is much sorrow - and if that sorrow and homesickness are not seen as an inherent part of our experience in the world, how deep can that experience be? I can well understand the rationalist critics, I share with Dawkins the estimation of the factual odds of a God existing (almost non-existent), but I have never thought that this was the point of the particular tradition that I was born in. It has a deeper point, a more serious point.

Philadelphia that the spiders ate

2010-11-04T11:31:00.005+02:00

I guess it is my country background that makes me wince to see fields turned into suburbs. A strange, alarming sight. I never had to work on fields in any serious way but I still felt their importance in my boyhood. Not a long time had passed then, almost none at all. I suppose that names of the fields are one of the biggest groups of place names in Finland - how many names now forgotten, buried by streets or overgrown by trees? So much sweat, so many generations, so many tales. Now gone. A whole culture, a world has passed during the life time of my parents, their world, their culture. In Southern Ostrobothnia that is: in one generation we moved from agriculture into service industry and high technology. In many ways it has been all for the best, but not in all cases, not at all. So much of the world of my childhood now eaten by spiders, so much long gone that once seemed so permanent. We are like grass. Of course things are immeasureably better now, but this mad, blind change does not inspire much trust in it's long term direction. There is no memory and no control, only change.

Matter of England - A Canterbury Tale

2010-10-03T08:26:00.002+03:00

Most of my Irish friends would better not read this post... I have been an anglophile since quite early childhood, strangely enough. Noel Streatfield, The Railway Children (oddly, our family seemed to specialice in classic English children's literature in our remote Southern Ostrobothnia of the 70's), only a bit later Rosemary Sutcliffe and Susan Cooper converted me before I even had encountered the English literary canon (which surely is one of the wonders of the world). Of course by an outsider anglophilia tends to be a romantic affair: for me England, even now, though not present day England, is the home of liberalism and reason, its literature the place where passion coheres with and is bounded by intellect. It certainly is, realistically, the place where my brand of middle way did historically originate. Of course it was only ever a part of the story, even if the best part, and has now mostly vanished anyway. The strange death of liberal England. I don't know why I should have been reminded of this and A Canterbury Tale and Emeric Pressburger this October morning. Perhaps it was the light of that magic movie in this foggy and relentlessly darkening and definitely un-English subarctic fall.

Sex, lies and videotape

2010-09-19T11:55:00.014+03:00

JP Siili's movie The Panopticon (and no, that's not its name, instead we have, absurdly, "Young Gods") got a very chilly critical reception in its time. It was accused of being titillating, pointless semi-pornography - and that surely was a reasonable expectation (especially concerning his later productions, slick and calculated, though not especially daring or pornographic). The viewers though hated it almost as much as the critics, and there are very few things that are more beloved by movie goers than titillating, pointless semi-pornography. I guess it still qualifies as such for some. I wouldn't say it myself - nudity, genitals, our various sexual activities seem rather commonplace, matter of fact things. This is what we are and what we do, not very elegant, perhaps, but there we are. Yes, surely there is also an element of titillation, often at least, but if the movie is any good, the story absorbs it: nudity, genitals, the various (and invariably quite banal) acrobatics will connect seemlessly with the rest of the action. And if they don't, well, then it does tend to become pointless semi-pornography and, so, much beloved by most people. The Panopticon is an odd movie, I guess it's not really good, very clumsy in parts (and one wonders what the intentions really were), unpleasant, but it works in its fashion, and is strangely impressive. One of the very few modern Finnish mainstream movies that doesn't treat sex sentimentally and/or commercially. Sex really isn't a very sentimental business, in the final analysis. Or even commercial.

Look into your heart, you will find a county Sligo

2010-09-17T11:04:00.004+03:00

Once again reading ancient Irish history (which can only be bettered by the taste of whiskey). Rehearsing familiar scenes, Collins dying, de Valera definitely living (might have been better the other way round). Strange how early I became interested in Irish history (especially the years between 1880-1923). But it was only a lengthy stay in Ireland that got me to combine my even older anglophilia with the hibernian equivalent. Yeats, of course, and the Anglo-Irish tradition, but seeing and feeling the place made the difference. There are many parallels with Finland of course, not only in history and politics, but in mentality. Swedes I think mix better with the middle class English. A certain common narrowness also, but I think the cultural barrenness lasted longer in Ireland though Finland never reached such heigths from where to descend. High ideals seem to have a universal way of transforming into mundane and dispiriting realities...

From the shadow of the factory

2010-08-20T10:46:00.007+03:00

I have been reading the excellent literary biography of Toivo Pekkanen by Matti Mäkelä. To write about this is of course very esoteric on many levels. But first and foremost because of the subject matter. Pekkanen is probably the most remote novelist imaginable to our current middle class consumer society. He emerged from the poorest working class in the early part of the 20th century, knew actual hunger and wrote in the context of a rigid and deeply divided class society. Mäkelä makes a very good point that the fact that Pekkanen is remote and unknown today is partly due to his own significant influence. He rejected the hate filled dichotomies and despite being resolutely non party political was a most social democratic writer, compromizer, integrator. He pointed, mapped out, the way to the future. These days he is obscure, but these days also serious literature itself is obscure, seriousness, I suppose, is obscure. Having so thoroughly immersed myself in literature and literary culture, I am a walking anachronism in this amnesiastic, hedonist society. Is there anything meaningful to say about this state of affairs? I suppose our postmodern answer would be, no. Can't help it though. A writer writing about a writer, intelligently, penetratingly, skillfully is such a joy, and not only a joy: long vistas are opened, thoughts provoked. Mäkelä is playful but his playfulness hides a fundamental - and, yes, anachronistic - seriousness. Strange to be concerned, moved by such long forgotten things.

Kaunim linn Eestis

2010-07-31T14:28:00.006+03:00

I guess I'm lucky that Tartu is not so well known a place with my Estonia travelling compatriots. The crawling distance from Tallinn harbour to the Old Town is thankfully good enough for most. (You don't actually need to leave the harbour nowadays at all for your cheap booze and grub, very practical.) But the hectic rough and tumble of Tallinn is nothing compared with the friendly cerebral Tartu - the first place in Estonia I ever visited, and the best. Estonia is such a lovely country for a Scandinavian traveller. Ideologically I absolutely prefer my native Nordic society with its idiosyncratic Finno-Ugric variations to the very hard and tough, often ice cold Estonian structures, but culturally Estonia feels much more cosmopolitan, both more connected to Central Europe and Russia than our culturally isolated, perennially towards Stockholm turned Finland. You can see this in shops, restaurants and cafés whose quality and variety far exceed our monotonous Scandinavian style industrialized fare. To lazily spend time in summery Tartu is such a luxurious experience, much missed, as these days chances for that don't come very often. Such a lovely place.

On hearing about a 2,5 year old boy's disappearance

2010-07-08T11:17:00.004+03:00

Seeing this news made me almost physically sick - whereas before it would have merited only a glance and just abstract sympathy. Such hostages to fortune in this random world. I suspect that children dying is the fundamental reason why we still employ gods, as little of use as they appear to be. God is the only abstraction that can deal with this issue. No science, no reason, nothing human is able to correct such an unspeakable thing, only God can, should he/she/it only exist. Which isn't very likely, so in practice we can only close our eyes and trust our luck and pretend that every man is an island, that no such loss is a common loss. What else is there to be done?

Quite an uninvited "et in Arcadia ego" moment into this high Nordic summer of brilliant blue skies and warm and light nights. There is not much to compare to this schizophrenic subarctic nature, from dark and grim November to this sudden explosion of life and light. And that's how it goes here: we remain perpetually poised, for our brief moment here, between great beauty and certain loss. There is also hope and proportion in this sentiment as grim as it may sound. We give hostages to fortune should we be so lucky, and I have been very lucky in my life, every moment a gift.

Not altogether encouraging

2010-06-18T08:12:00.004+03:00

I'm not given to linking, for laziness mainly, or commenting on current affairs (surface froth), but there is something in this Krugman column that seems, feels, to capture something of this moment. Our political system in the West truly is becoming more dysfunctional, more decadent. And, yes, structural deficit spending is one of the symptoms (one that can be, btw, also addressed by tax rises and not just cuts), but at this particular moment it does make much sense to make large scale public investments (that would not for the most part become structural and permanent). Perhaps we are too far out of balance to be able to do the rational, the sensible thing. That's always an indication of systemic failure. Which really would not be very encouraging. Rather alarming, unsettled times to my mind, these.

Bringing Actaeon to Mrs Porter no more

2010-05-21T13:59:00.007+03:00

Today's reading consisted of contemporary reviews of T.S.Eliot's early poetry. I expected to find much silliness, and there certainly was some, but I was more struck by the quality of the writing, and not only quality - there was an intensity and seriousness in the tone, a belief that literature is of vital importance... How quaint is that. And how quaint to find literary criticism that is beautifully written and not filled with the latest unintelligible jargon from Paris or with journalistic shallowness and crowd pleasing. Those seem to be the two choices these days when debating serious literature is a peripheral, rather eccentric past-time, mostly practiced in the campuses, and not practiced, evidently, with much faith in the importance of the activity. Well, perhaps this nostalgia is mistaken. Most nostalgia is. But I do wonder - how can we expect to keep civilization going if we are not civilized ourselves, not educated in this oldfashioned sense which translates roughly into having a civilizational memory, a dialogue with the past, a serious, living connection with it? Very elitist, I'm sure, to have these worries, but I can't help having a certain sense of foreboding in seeing this cultural amnesia advancing so quickly. What can be the end result, what brave new ahistorical, non-literary world?

The last of Europe's stone age race

2010-04-16T07:57:00.004+03:00

This was occasioned by the surprising similarity of (constructed) Proto-Uralic with modern Finnish - an image comes of scattered tribes wandering in the endless forests of Northern Eurasia while more to the south agriculture is already breeding much bigger, much more quickly changing and evolving populations. Wandering westward and ending up by the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia: endless forests ending to the sea and history beginning. Strange to have such ancient connections in this era of general amnesia. Well, hopefully not only a litter of bones and chronicles in our Finno-Ugric hearts: I have seen some strange, not altogether pleasant conclusions rising from this rather strange heritage. But surely it is not a bad thing to have a memory.

The limits of art

2010-04-16T07:39:00.002+03:00

I am reading a biography of Anne Sexton, a poet previously quite unknown to me. Especially her early poems are remarkable stuff: at heart serious speech in lovely, quite strict and complex form. Quite a contrast to her messy, often unkind personal life and self, like so often with serious artists. We are not measured by our exalted moments, by our exalted thoughts and beliefs, but by deeds, only by deeds, of love or otherwise. The limits to art are our human limits. But to say this is to leave much unsaid: the serious speech, the exalted thoughts are not made meaningless by life, by deeds, by human failure. Larkin always comes to mind in this context: a miserable man if there ever was one, whose poetry was not miserable at all. The poems stand independent but not separate from the poet. They stand witness to life, to humanity. They measure our potential reach and the extent of our failure to reach it in this cold, cruel world.

On Kjell Westö

2010-03-17T07:18:00.002+02:00

I read pitifully little Finnish literature, but when I make the effort, I'm often surprised by the excellent, fierce quality. Kjell Westö's Helsinki quartet is deceptive reading, certainly quite uneven at places (though this might be partly due to the translation, I'm not able to read him in his native Swedish), but oddly impressive. I read recently a relatively lukewarm review of him in a Swedish magazine where he was criticized for the "shallowness" of his characters. That is very understandable, there is a strange, gimmicky smoothness there, a sense of passing over things - understandable but still quite mistaken: there is an ambitious scope in those smooth storylines, a grasping for history, for generations. Strange to find such things in these ahistorical times - he certainly earns his popularity with those narrative skills but the popularity might cost him some critical acclaim. Interestingly, I find myself unable to make any very definitive conclusions, apart from the sense that there is something there. These texts will have to be revisited, and that is very rare with any contemporary fiction, no matter in which language.

A rose rabbi

2010-03-04T09:56:00.007+02:00

Sometimes when I watch our two little boys I think that this ride is too wild for me, too unsafe, cruel. With this age - still feebly painting lakes - one already gets a sense of generations, dear people forever passed: we truly are like grass. It is bewildering that so many don't seem to be in awe of all the sorrow, the pain and the beauty of this experience, this life. No protection, no safety, and all will be lost in the end, all have to be given up. You have to be exceptionally well wadded to pass through this untouched. But I am not, and thus often filled with dread because filled with love, and, thus, lucky...

The once arsenal of democracy

2010-03-04T08:51:00.011+02:00

Now with the waning of American influence and the rise of Chinese and Indian and, of course, particularly with the accompanying decadence and moral corruption of the Late Empire, we are in danger of forgetting that it was not always so. I am currently reading about the building of the Berlin Wall, the initial days of Western confusion and the elation of the West Berliners when the USA finally made a visible show of support and sent in a symbolic force of arms - hundreds of thousands rushed to streets to greet the forces. Now could we imagine the same situation in Eastern Berlin, what kind of greeting would have a Soviet battle group gotten? With a wall built to stop the selfsame people from leaving? It is hard for me to understand people who see the Cold War as having been waged by moral equivalents. Of course the Western corruption and decadence, the calculations and machinations always were there even then, naturally they were - what else can you expect of liberal democracy, of human nature? The divide was cynically used to build a gigantic, absurdly outsized and deadly influential military-industrial complex, but despite of that, the divide was real, a chasm. And when American forces, American might poured to fronts during the WW2, it was the only thing capable of keeping the West safe from genuinely mad terror states - despite of the accompanying decadence and moral corruption. The difference is that then those destructive forces were being kept in check. Where do we now have effective counterforces to all this cynicism, greed and manipulation? Who would now have enough faith in our structures, enough idealism to defend them?

Happy ever after in the market place

2010-02-05T08:09:00.004+02:00

The First World War ended in 1991. The fighting had quite petered out well before the end in any case. All that remained were some colonial wars administered by the successor of the Royal Navy guarding the world trade lanes. This is how the short century now appears to us but this provisional perspective will probably change as our view gets longer. It might be, though it does not appear that likely at the moment, that we will once have such continuous spans that one can see this mad half millennium of explosion of information, technology and people as one single, brief moment in history. At this crest (and that's where we have always been), there is no way of knowing, no certainty of direction, no finality of judgement on the past. It is a gloomy moment, surely, with this decadent triumph of capital (which once seemed like a very messy, partial victory of reason, progress and social liberalism, but a victory nevertheless) - it is only a brief moment though. Who knows what will come, this particular constellation will shortly pass.

Scientism

2010-01-23T15:12:00.003+02:00

There are not many more miraculous things than natural science in our human world. What has been established is strange beyond anything imaginable, and it does say quite a bit of us that we have been able to establish this strangeness. However, every now and then there creeps a certain imperious arrogance into the tones of many defenders of science (in these surprisinginly superstitious and credulous times) - a certain sense of finiteness. Of all things. A sense that we have already established pretty much everything there is to be established, only some closing touches needed for the Theory of Everything in physics, and that will be it. This appears very silly to me: it is quite evident that we haven't even begun to touch the beginnings of the possibilities of our experience. Who knows what will be established in the future, who knows what we will come to realize about the potential of our awareness? It appears self-evident to me that we are only at the very beginning of our journey, and it seems quite possible that we will never even get a chance to seriously set on it (in these surprisingly superstitious and credulous, hysterical times).

Why art?

2009-12-16T07:42:00.003+02:00

The question is strange - this has been something instinctive. As much as I have interest in philosophy, politics, religion, it has been art that has always been most meaningful. It is what connects life with thought, what infuses our experience with meaning and form, what provides us with the longest views. This is truly much claimed, maybe only through an individual quirk. But I don't believe so: we have not begun to understand our experience, and there is nothing that has penetrated as deep to human possibilities - philosophy is too constrained by formal logic, religion is largely meaningless, natural science does not even attempt such things. History is central, naturally, but it is more the place we are situated in, the scene of action, and its study is closely related to art in any case. There is not really anything to compare.

Paradise postponed

2009-12-13T08:55:00.007+02:00

I did not expect much, but there was a little bit of audacity of hoping: circumstances make a president, and the circumstances for Obama have not been much different than what FDR faced, having quite cautiously campaigned for balanced budgets and relatively orthodox economic policies. It is pretty meaningless to second guess from such a laughably distant vantage point - and perhaps the correct reading of the balance of power is that no meaningful reform can even be attempted and all that is possible to have is an avoidance of outright idiocy and outright sabotage of the few central social liberal structures (both became very familiar during Obamas predecessor's awful reign). But still, it is very hard to avoid the thought that maybe there were the makings of a transformation of the political landscape in the scary collapse of trust in the financial markets. I guess we'll never know now.

Three (Burkean) cheers for Social Democracy

2009-12-09T08:05:00.005+02:00

It occurs to me that there is no need to reinvent the wheel, no need to endlessly ponder about alternatives, sensible middle ways to replace unjust, irrational free market plutocracy or bloody, irrational state socialism. We already have the sensible middle way: the Nordic social democratic state that combines healthy, dynamic economy with strong safety nets, significant income redistribution and in addition has open and liberal political structures. The Nordic social democratic society is based on a web of many powerful influences: the market, the unions, the civil society, the government. You still can get rich, create fortunes and jobs, but if you are poor your children still will go to the same high quality schools like everyone else and they can easily afford university education: they can compete fairly with more fortunate age mates. No wonder social mobility is much higher in the Nordic countries than in the USA or the UK.

Well, I suppose I can still, just barely, speak in the present tense. This reasonable, compromise based society of many interests and influences was created by a unique historical and cultural constellation. It is not fundamentally based on reason but chance and circumstances. And circumstances are changing: our irrationality and greed are breaking through and much control is already given up to market forces - and they surely will end up destroying the structures that keep social competition both strong and fair. But at least we have a model that has functioned in real life, that is reproducable. Unlike, one might add, any "pure", Randian free market fantasies.

Societies of friends in England and New England

2009-11-20T11:19:00.004+02:00

There can't be many as uplifting and hopeful stories in our dark human history than the turn of a large part of the Anglo-Saxon dissenters towards liberalism and progress. I was long amused by Tory cynicism, their wallowing in the gutter that is human nature, but I have grown less and less amused as I have grown. Of course these earliest of reformers were absurdly, unreally highminded, rigid, often lifeless. But the ills they fought against (being most often the first to fight, the first to organize) were of such awful nature - slavery, aggression, cruelty, unequality - that surely we can excuse these flaws. All those various denominations, Quakers and Unitarians, Presbyterians and Methodists, forming in later generations such an aristocracy of intelligence and culture, leaving behind the worst of fundamentalism (as witnessed today in the USA). It makes one wonder about Calvinism, what was there, in that grim credo, to ignite such a flowering of human progress? Coming from a Lutheran background, more staid, but in some ways more comprehensive (thinking of our Nordic societies with all our enlightened structures and impulses) this moral fervour and burst of energy seems very remarkable. I suppose it is the Protestant in me that makes one think that absolutely none of this could have been left for Rome...

Conspiritis

2009-11-04T11:21:00.003+02:00

It is hard not to see the present mania for the most bizarre and impossible conspiracies (Obama drinking baby blood in an orgy in a Californian mansion or whatever à la Alex Jones etc. etc.) as related to a general cynicism and lack of faith towards liberal democratic structures and belief in reason and progress. Perhaps we are losing our nerve. And so need comfort: it surely is a comforting thought to think that history is controllable even if only by the CIA or the NSA or the Elders of the Nation of Zion or what you currently have. But it is not, no-one controls this bloody, chaotic mess. Our tragedy is in that you don't need to hide the worst things - the worst things are in plain view, and you still can't change them. To a large degree they are the result of our human nature - we don't need an ancient world wide conspiracy to keep us from achieving a just, rational and safe society, we do it ourselves. One sign of this is this present angry credulity cynically used to promote reactionary ideas and to counter all attempts towards progress and understanding.

Thoughts on cost-effectiveness

2009-10-16T00:08:00.005+03:00

To witness history even in this so very modest scale is to see lives casually thrown away. One can of course trace the causes, the pathways of power, blind and random, but that does not amount to very much - at most a sillily righteous relief of having avoided the fate of the less fortunate. There surely will never be a safe place for us, a home, here, and what we have, what we experience, is all there is: lives casually thrown away. We have to deaden ourselves to survive in the world. There is a certain bleakness, a certain terror even, in our experience, but that is not all there is: there are countering factors, love, art, the long views. A beautiful landscape certainly - but very chilly.

Oh, what a literary century

2009-09-30T05:47:00.006+03:00

Paul Fussell's well known observations on the importance of literature to the First World War experience of British soldiers (not only officers), got me thinking in somewhat elegiaic fashion. I suppose it really is true that the high point of the literary culture was the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century - then quite widespread literacy and even education (and self-education) was combined with the absence of electronic media. Now we have even more widespread literacy and education (and self-education) but books are getting increasingly peripheral to this, to our civilization. Information and education are more and more in the electronic form. Well, o tempora o mores, it's quite always been like this: tools change, our human inclinations and reflexes, not so hugely. So, caution surely is needed when contemplating this particular change. But still, I have to say, being so immersed in literature, being so shaped by it, that I do find this change alarming. I don't really think that there is anything to compare with a book when it comes to deep human understanding, the essential questions, whether philosophical, ethical, personal, being addressed. So, one wonders now, in AD 2009 that what will the new culture be like - how will literature, the literary tradition be replaced? Apart from lots of reality-tv. One does wonder.

Dawkins sucks

2009-08-27T07:53:00.004+03:00

I guess he doesn't really - I noticed from The God Delusion that I place myself exactly into the same category as he does as regards the existence of God, i.e. that it is something exceedingly unlikely and that one should live one's life as if she/he/it didn't exist. That is with the knowledge that gentleness and love will not necessarily be rewarded and that cruelty and aggression will not often be punished, that there are no happy endings, only endings. Strange, perhaps, but I think that this attitude to life is more virtuous and more serious than basing one's ethics on rewards and punishments. This said, Dawkins does seem awfully brittle, light - there is no sense of tragedy there, no sense of sorrow. Also no understanding of religion in its essence as being serious speech about our human condition (the religious themselves are not of help here). Well, perhaps I'm led astray by subjective sentiment, but I'm not convinced - at heart I suppose this is an argument about the nature of reason. Though as usual I seem to lack both the time and the capability to formulate the argument more precisely. Oh well.

Failed nations all around

2009-08-25T07:06:00.004+03:00

Scott Peterson's excellent Me Against My Brother is one the very few first hand accounts that I have come across of the bloody and tragic events in Somalia in the early 1990's - a place and time that have for a long time interested me. Not a very comfortable view of humanity emerges: when order collapses we seem to turn invariably into beasts, and prey. And certainly not a very comfortable view of the developed countries - as much as the responsibility (as far as there is such a thing) lies in deep seated local cultural conflicts: a nomad society encountering modernity, and modern weaponry. But if there is one thing certain, it is that we are no innocent bystanders in this tragedy. There is no question that the Western audiences are frivolous and decadent, and kept frivolous and decadent by solely profit seeking, ad and subscription centred corporate media. Peterson's style of journalism is probably a dying art, and even if not, very few will care. There is a Burkean defence for this state of affairs: we don't have the capability to do the right thing, a mere attempt would end in tragedy and blood path. But that defence is wearing rather thin. We can't do what we should do - but we can be more intelligent, more responsible, more aware. That is not too much to ask. Should the civilization progress (at the moment a somewhat daring proposition) the posterity will surely only see failed nations in this era of opulence, starvation and blood.

Turing and humanity

2009-08-21T07:53:00.002+03:00

Oddly I chose for morning work trip reading Andrew Hodges’ description of the chemical castration of Alan Turing. Once the bile had receded I was once again struck how beautiful and how serious Hodges’ writing is. It is not as odd a pair as one might think: so often, it seems to me, ethics and esthetics do cohere. In good writing it is most obvious. And the text, the seriousness of it, did get me thinking about the sordid, the brutal affair (or perhaps actually my private reaction to it), in a larger context. I suppose we should always also beware these so selfevident dualities: the cruelty and the innocence, the aggression and the openness. We none of us are completely innocent, and our monstrous society only reflects (and encourages in turn) the monsters inside us all. This is obvious, of course: there is a danger in righteous rage, of whitewashing and denial. But to accept totally is surely the greater crime than to rage partially hypocritically. The society is the arena where we can most easily progress and through that progress start an inner healing process. That can be the only realistic way forward for us.

Liberalism and Nietzsche

2009-08-20T11:14:00.000+03:00

I’m sure this only makes sense to my own idiosyncratic sense of liberalism but essentially I have come to place it as the boundary that permanently separates Nietzsche from acceptablity. To phrase it overly glibly... For me the essence of liberalism lies in its permanent uncertainty as to what degree do meanings rise out of the objective, commonly observable state of affairs and what and how large then is the role of individual experience and will in shaping and creating these meanings. The foundation is the trust in and the certainty of doubt – that there is no human way in these circumstances to achieve a meaningful basis for any kind of certainty on this fundamental dilemma. This quite naturally leads to ad hoc, pragmatic and provisional, moderate settlements – to a permanent acceptance of pluralism in human affairs.

The audacity of good writing

2009-08-18T11:08:00.001+03:00

I have been fascinated and much impressed by Obama’s Dreams from My Father – I roughly knew about his eccentric background and expected an interesting and much better than average aspiring politician’s memoir. But I certainly didn’t expect this: genuinely good writing – which in this form requires high, disinterested intelligence, honesty and a robust, unsentimental moral vision of life. All factors surely more or less grave hindrances in an aspiring politician. This is not to say that the text wouldn’t hide things and wouldn’t paper over some serious counter-points. But the reader has the feeling of engaging in a serious and open intellectual argument. With a mainstream politician, of all people, quite a surreal experience I have to say. What on earth is this man doing presiding over a corrupt and decadent, decaying political system? The beginning has certainly not been very good – surely an FDR would have radically seized these opportunities? Instead we have had overly cautious, overly modest half-hearted approaches. And FDR was a deceitful, devious, egocentred person, not interested in abstract thought or robust moral views of life. An intelligent and honest person might not be the best choice for that position. Well, with these poisonous and hateful forces rampant in the USA, it might not be the era for an FDR at all, probably a Father Coughlin would have rather better chances. Perhaps overly dramatic, but I could not avoid some dark forebodings reading this excellent, perceptive book - he is made for a perfect hate figure for these atavistic, hysterical reactionary forces.

Richer dust

2009-07-19T12:15:00.003+03:00

There can be such a thing as too much information: I am reading an excellent modern biography of Rupert Brooke and warts do predominate. A fascinating character though - I have been vaguely aware that his life was much more interesting than both the legend or the poetry (though the latter has flashes of excellence and in some photos he truly does look angelic, no wonder the contemporaries lost their barings as regards him, and no great wonder that he himself did). Such a range though: in his correspondence and verse he makes absolutely unsentimental, sharp and fresh observations only to sunk into self-centred, self-regarding hysteria, primitive misogeny and anti-semitism. At times a profound writer, at times a spoiled immature adolescent. So far then from Sorley whose famous assessment of Brooke's war sonnets is devastatingly accurate. There might have been something there had he survived - but probably anything after would have been a long, sad anticlimax. Again so different from Sorley who surely was a bitter loss to literature, and to his age.

Subarctic summer thoughts

2009-06-30T12:24:00.000+03:00

I spent much of the night reading (Andrew Birkin's remarkable, eerie J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys) and was suddenly struck by the thought of how lovely the Finnish climate really is. Now this is an attitude not to be expected - I would recommend trying the pitch dark, wet and cold November with the silent, grim, huddled people to anyone lightly exclaiming the very same sentiment. Or the biting December winds bringing sleet from the Baltic with the day lasting all of five hours in the south and none in Lapland. But now the day lasts almost 20 hours (and 24 in the north) and the air is warm and sweet and the nature suddenly burst to life (to be extinguished again in a matter of mere months). It is this violent contrast that makes the experience so strong and memorable. Further towards the tundra and the summer will be too faint to register and the winter too dominating and to the south the light and dark will be more mixed, less violently opposed, and the summer warmth longer and more reliable (last summer we had almost no hot days at all). This is an exhausting mixture (for these few mad, energy bursting weeks we have in exchange long dark months of fall and winter), but exhilarating also: a crazy, manic-depressive year, violently alternating between extremes of light and dark, of cold and warmth...

No harsh patronage

2009-05-21T14:30:00.003+03:00

Last week the new member of the family finally arrived - it had been a long and at times a very difficult wait. It is a curious activity, caring for the young, no more worthwhile thing easily found in this world. Not very Nietzschean I guess to be in service, and that's what it is, serving; and what is truly harsh is the way we measure that service: there is no way of perfection, and partially the unconditional trust is always failed. But this is how we are weighed, in deeds, not thoughts, in love, not intellect - and even if there is no perfection, there is protection and warmth, or the awful, unforgivable lack of them. So, in that sense there is no harsh patronage, even if there is such a hostage to fortune as to lack words to describe, in this unpredictable, uncaring world. With love comes dread, but without love there is nothing here. That is the way of our human world.

We were seventy-six for seven

2009-05-21T13:28:00.003+03:00

I suppose my two most eccentric poetic predilections are vastly preferring the early Wallace Stevens to the later production and, even more bizarrely, seeing early Betjeman as a giant of poetry of his era. Later the sentimentality and a certain clumsiness of metre creep through, but the early poems are angelic. This, though naturally on hugely more humble scale, is a kind of equivalent of Eliot's famous confession of being a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics. It belongs to the classical tradition, surely, to appreciate Betjeman's glittering surfaces and rhythmical skill. It has seemed to countless critics (these days I guess no-one is any longer much interested) that this is all there is: a silly pose and a very oldfashioned, passé view of the form and function of poetry. I don't know - it seems such a selfevidently facile view of both young Betjeman and art. He does point to deeper things, indirectly, through the skill, through the offbeat, offcentre handling of the subject matter. You don't have to spell out things, you don't have to shout from the rooftops that this is great, weighty and serious poetry - neither do you have to be deliberately obscure and leave an enticing trail of riddles for dusty academics to uncover (and here we come to early Wallace Stevens as well).

Mõtlen et homme ongi see päev

2009-05-09T01:26:00.010+03:00

It is probably far too rarely that I ever pause and reflect on how amazingly successful I have been on the terms that I once so uncompromizingly put to myself. To now have such hostages to fortune, to have such a unified voice, such a coherent way of being in the world was once beyond my wildest dreams. This is of course a very exalted way of putting it - in more mundane words I have simply placed myself open to the random ice cold ways of this uncaring world, as I think we are all obligated to do. And even though for some people this surely would be pitifully little, something always taken for granted, it is not so for me - and that is the only meaningful measure we can have here. So after all these qualifications, this late arrival represents a true measure of success. I should never forget this - that I did after all manage to fashion a self capable of love, of being loved, that this did happen to me no matter how impossible it once seemed.

Dover Beach

2009-04-21T08:27:00.005+03:00

We have pitifully little time to achieve full moral maturity here. I wonder if anyone ever has, Shakespeare, maybe? In any case I would think that any such maturity would involve a full realization of our permanent disjointedness. A clever, grasping, amoral animal will forever remain a central part of us ( I can easily recognize that in my own being, the deep, dark impulse). While another part is attempting a strange pilgrimage towards a better home – and sometimes the landscape, the experience feels exhilarating, the cold and the beauty taking the breath away. But mostly not, mostly we muddle, don’t connect, don’t cohere - there will be no escape from that. This we must accept and go on living with the awareness that we would not choose to live so, given liberty to make the choice. Only in this world there won’t ever be such liberty. Sometimes when I watch our carefree little boy I’m filled with huge dread: he could so easily be taken away from us – it’s a cruel, random world after all. The Christians believe that the universe is not so. There will never be no knowing, but all reason tells us otherwise. I wonder if anyone will ever truly be content with that understanding, with no self-deception or wishful thinking involved.

Oh Ontario, oh Jennifer Jason Leigh

2009-04-09T09:32:00.000+03:00

For me music almost never compares with literature. But when it does, it does it with force - at its best it really can compete with poetry. Which is much said from me. So, I do have a small selection of musical favourites, basically centering on pop (classical music, dance and heavy rock among others suffer from the non-centrality of words in them), just certain individual songs, not whole ouvres. And very few contemporary bands, and only one whose lyrics I really respect as pure poetry: The Weakerthans' lyrics have an amazing reach and depth, amazing quirky freshness. And not just as part of the totality of a song and performance, but they also work as they are, as just language. This almost never happens. Well, perhaps there is a certain connection anyway between gloomy Winnipeg and gloomy South of Finland, a certain sympathy but in any case John K Samson is one of the few contemporary poets whose work I follow.

Stars in their pockets like grains of sand

2009-04-03T09:32:00.004+03:00

There is a great concept in the Finnish language: "yleissivistys". It approximately means the standard of knowledge and understanding that a well educated, well rounded person should have. History, geography, foreign languages, high art and culture etc. etc. are thought to naturally belong to this category, but it is strange how little natural sciences and mathematics figure in it. This is surely quite a universal state of affairs anywhere in the industrial world - you can be thought as a knowledgeable and highly educated person without having the faintest idea of the structure and nature of our physical universe. (That can, btw, only be described as strange beyond anyone's imagination - or I suppose it could be said that our Newtonian common sense experience is the strangely behaving anomaly here.)

Modern physics especially has me standing in pure awe (though I rarely admit to it). One could think that much of this wild and highly abstract theorizing is meaningless unless it were for the fact that time and time again theories have been proven correct after a practical, empiricial experiment has - often long after - become possible. I do claim primacy for our human sciences, but they too operate in the physical world: we should understand the sheer magical strangeness of it. (I would even argue that the humanities would be best positioned to give depth and meaning to these amazing findings, but they seem to lack both interest and capability of even beginning to explore these treasures.)

Not guilty

2009-03-25T13:58:00.002+02:00

To continue the theme from the previous post. I think that what most clearly characterizes, defines my brand of robust and self-confident liberalism from its bland and diluted official version (that basically everyone, kind of, supports in one way or the other) is that it is completely unapologetic. I’m quite aware of the awful crimes committed in the name of the liberal civilization (and some of them even genuinely so). Well, our human history is in any case based on awful crimes. If any random tyranny manages to establish a certain stability for a couple of generations, that stability will be based on crime and aggression, it will be maintained by crime and aggression and it will be destroyed by them. That is what history is, what it (most likely) will be and what it has been. The only feeble exception is this unique effort for rational self-control. It is of course gigantic hubris to think that it will amount to anything: in fact it is almost certainly bound to fail. But in that failure it would not be remarkable: without reason and self-control all our efforts will fail. It is the attempt that is unique – the first conscious effort ever to end the slow holocaust of history.

The centre that couldn't hold

2009-03-03T12:21:00.004+02:00

The early 20th century was such brutal time to liberal self-belief in the West: the twin nightmares of the world wars, the collapse of the international system, the world depression followed by sustained, credible and vital totalitarian challenges. And after all that, amidst all the ruins of the mid-century stood - yes, Western liberalism. A curious end to all those horrendous blows. But they did have an effect: postwar liberalism has been a hollow materialist affair, there is no vigour, no self-assuredness left, only a method of increasing production. The masses are apathetic, tired by work, consuming mindless entertainment. The elites are intellectually timid and morally puny, concentrating on their technocratic efficiency. This apologetic affair is an alien liberalism for me - the tradition is not, should not be defined by doubt and uncertainty but by a fierce assertion of doubt and uncertainty combined with a firm, self-confident rejection of all those pathetic (and morally and intellectually disastrous) projects to force a pretended certainty on our human experience (I suppose currently the strongest version is the primitive fundamentalist religion). But that sort of confidence and affirmation is not what we have, and as there sooner or later will become an existential crisis in one form or another, I don't believe that these undefended positions will be held, however correct and proper response they are to our experience of being in the world. This simply won't do, not indefinitely.

"One of Freedom's wars"

2009-02-26T13:45:00.008+02:00

After finishing Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy it is not possible not to feel that something absolutely profound has been said about the First World War. Not everything there is to say of course, that would be an impossibility, and one can legitimately see flaws and inaccuracies in the text but one cannot avoid a recognition that something deeply meaningful has been posited, a meaningful dialogue opened. That is what fiction is able to do: to bridge two experiences. One would think that the study of history as an academic discipline would aim for the same result only using different methods and being bound by stricter and narrower rules. It doesn't though. Good, profound historical research is exceedingly rare. The discipline is defined in practice in a way to preclude any attempt to profundity, any centering of human experience, the wildness of our human experience.

The study of history is largely an elaborate kabuki play whose relation to actual human experience is tortuous and distant. This comes from aiming to "scientific" respectability. It is an old axiom that history as a discipline is the closest to literature. Well, most historians are deeply ashamed of this claim instead of seeing it as an accolade that it is (and those that are enthusiastic about it are that for all the wrong reasons). There is a difference to human sciences - and this statement comes from someone who largely does accept that history only happens in the physical and material world and that historians should aim for explaining causation. Still there is a difference that comes from our own nature of being aware creators of meanings. Not only do we need to map out the material boundaries but also their meaning to our passionate lives. So, this is where academic history fails: we no doubt have a long queue of angry historians defending the generals against Barker's powerful indictment, defending power and its distortions - or being entangled in the absurd complexities of the radical theory, not seeing the deepness of the tragedy, leaving all profundity to fiction. A strange spectacle.

Hier stehe ich

2009-01-28T10:59:00.005+02:00

The famous stand by Luther at Worms epitomizes to many modern politically correct academics the vast sins of the era of the reformation: the monstrous Western ego, the manic strive for domination, the single track railroads to Auschwitz and what you have. Of course Protestantism is seen these days more as a concequence than cause of modernity (when it is thought about analytically at all), but nevertheless it is very popular to see the emergence of the post-medieval Europe as a costly moral failure. I don't share that perspective: in my eyes Protestantism very obviously opened the gates for enlightenment and emancipation. (This is not to deny the existence of the monstrous ego and the bloody strive for domination - but that is only one aspect of a complex whole.) The American Puritans started by hunting witches - mere two centuries later they were freeing slaves, fighting for gender equality, combatting imperialism and aggression, renouncing primitive theologies. Or the best of them were: there is a deep duality to the experience, a highminded, progressive and enlightened impulse resisted by know-nothing, panicky fundamentalism. And as much as I admire the majestic liberal turn of the Anglo-American non-conformism, there is a certain note of abstraction and distance in this admiration - which probably comes from my Lutheran Finnish pietist background - compared with icy Calvin, Luther certainly was a wretched sinner, a monstrous man, who somehow still managed to form in parts a universally meaningful message on human experience, the kind of height that Calvin never achieved: simul peccator et iustus. Which is the most anyone can really be in this imperfect, cruel human world. But that note of mysticism perhaps makes one less inclined to activism and concrete deeds...

The way of the world

2009-01-20T10:57:00.004+02:00

I have repeatedly argued on these pages that we are fundamentally imprisoned by history and unable to liberate ourselves as a collective from our shortsighted, grasping human nature. What this means on the high political level is that reasonable, intelligent people hardly ever get to the real power and if they by some miracle do, they are utterly unable to rule with intelligence and reason. All political cultures, all political processes are fundamentally irrational. Even our liberal democratic solution that at least tries to approximate as reasonable course as possible. So, today we seem to have a person exceptionally intelligent, perhaps exceptionally reasonable being harshly bounded by one of the most dysfunctional Western political systems. What he, his administration can achieve remains to be seen - but in any case it will be radically less than what he is expected to accomplish. The system would need a more fundamental New Deal than what FDR accomplished but maybe at least some key reforms can be implemented and the present disastrous slide into moral decadence at least halted. Perhaps even this is to hope too much: so far Obama seems overly cautious, overly bound to the established, and corrupt, and irrational, folkways of the imperial Washington. Much, too much, is depending on a single person, however intelligent, however well-meaning. Interesting times, these.

Keats reconsidered

2009-01-19T11:24:00.002+02:00

I suppose the Romantics are the least congenial group of writers for me when it comes to English literature. O, that artificial diction and saccharine sentiment... Etc. Those exclamations, loose, undisciplined language. But now at least with Keats (and why not then with others) it seems that my very early judgment was wrong again. I think it was based on Endymion and Hyperion where he certainly is not my cup of syrup. Should have gone for the better stuff, I guess. His letters certainly give a marvellous image of a frighteningly perceptive and still amazingly humane and likeable great artist (seems to be a very rare combination). In fact the tone reminds me of Charles Sorley and does then give an idea of his potential; even more cruelly early end for his career - Keats at least had time to show his mature scope. It seems that the Romantics were exceptionally uneven in their output - they seem to have been really good when they were good, but much of the time they didn't perform near their peak, and when they were bad... On the whole, there is in me a certain preference for more classical, more controlled and distanced emotional approach in art. I tend to distrust overt artistic emotion especially when it seems to control the form and twist it unshapely, unpolished.

Sense and unsentimentality

2009-01-14T08:46:00.007+02:00

I have lately been delighting in the New Pelican Guide to English Literature on my work trips. The series originates from the 1950's, my revised edition being from 1982. This probably explains why the marvelously quirky and individual writers treat literature if it were a universally important and serious moral concern. Postmodernity has certainly gotten rid of that attitude and the literature departments around the world are for the most part happily free of anything universally important and serious. Or of any love of literature. Anyway, I'm now in the middle of part 5, From Blake to Byron and two exceptionally challenging and perceptive essays, one by Lionel Trilling on Mansfield Park and the other by Malcolm Bradbury on Emma, made me think again my lukewarm attitude to Jane Austen.

I have never been too fond of that steely tory glitter behind the graceful prose. But it might be that the provinciality is on my side mostly after all: there perhaps is certain universality that can be glimpsed through that absolute integrity and serious moral concern however constricted they appear to an unsympathetic and hasty reader. I recently happened to reread Pride and Prejudice (I suppose after 25 years) and the experience was admittedly very remarkable: the text was so deceptively effortless and elegant that one might really mistake the story itself to be the fundamental concern, actually pretty much as modern Hollywood seems to "read" Austen. But afterwards, what was left was a feeling of something having been very severely and unsentimentally weighed. That serious severe weighing is the essence of Austen - and it should be our own attitude in this decadent and emotionally overindulgent era. Not to mention intellectually confused.

Nurmo municipality in memoriam

2008-12-31T12:45:00.005+02:00

The sorry spectacle of the current local government "reform" has now reached my home town of Nurmo which will be amalgamated with the provincial capital by midnight. An efficient service provider with better performance in every key statistic will join with a much bigger, less efficient and more bureaucratic unit. On the national level this so called reform will certainly achieve bigger service organizations - though in quite random and ragtag fashion - without touching the very heavy structures of the services itself. Some haphazard savings will probably be made but the fundamental issues will be left untouched. This is the democratic political process at its sorriest: every main party was driven by its special interests towards a different overall solution with the end result being even worse than any of the proposed individual schemes.

The process in Nurmo was especially repulsive: a strong and active citizen opinion (almost two thirds in a well attended municipal referendum opposed the solution) was overruled by the morally - one hopes only that - corrupt local council which ended up agreeing with the proposal by one vote majority. The amazingly ugly strong arm tactics led by the leading provincial daily ended up successful. The Burkean in me simply detests abstract, arbitrary principles being chosen over actual historical experience, a deeply rooted local identity. But I suppose our Scandinavian governmental system is one of the least Burkean in existance. From that angle it is inconceivable that local identities would be important as such, that the coats of arms, lines and names on maps, shared historical experiences would be just as important to people as the municipalities' role as social service providers. Any more Burkean reform would have respected and kept these valuable symbolic forms while reforming the substance carefully and effectively. Now we ended up with the worst of both worlds: losing the local rooted identity and keeping essentially in place the top heavy service delivery structures. Oh well, the way of the world...

Postscript in Finnish:

Ilkka-lehden toiminta tässä surkuhupaisassa prosessissa hakee vertaistaan. On toki totuttu melkoisen ruokottomaan menoon sen suhteen, mutta tässä silmittömässä kampanjassa kyllä välillä jätettiin väliin ne alkeellisimmatkin ammattimaisen journalismin periaatteet. Toimituksen johdossa on aktiivisia toimijoita ja vaikuttajia Seinäjoen kunnallispolitiikassa ja journalistiset toimintatavat näköjään alistettiin näiden vaikuttajien henkilökohtaisille poliittisille intresseille. Tätä ei mitenkään lehden kommentti-artikkeleissa edes vaivauduttu peittelemään. Uutisointi oli äärimmäisen värittynyttä ja manipuloitua ja prosessista annettu kuva ilmeisesti aivan tarkoituksellisen vääristynyt. Karua on meno Hokkas-slovakiassa. Nurmon valtuuston toiminta on sitten saaga erikseen - toivoa sopii, että romahdus oli sentään vain älyn ja poliittisen ymmärryksen tasolla. Epäilemättä joka tapauksessa tämän räikeän epädemokraattisen enemmistön kirstuun poikii jatkossa myös maallista hyvää erinäisten postien ja arvonimien suhteen. On ilmeisesti poikinutkin jo: hyvä taito osata nöyrästi kumartaa oikealle ja pyllistää oikealle taholle vaikka sitten tämä jälkimmäinen olisikin se jota vaaleilla valittuna olisi pitänyt edustaa.

Keynesian times

2008-12-21T11:59:00.005+02:00

A link to an excellent introduction to Keynes in the context of the present crisis by Skidelsky. Certainly a right person for the task: his brilliant biography of Keynes was my first real introduction to this crazily talented, fascinating 20th century figure. Of course Keynes' economics and his quite crucial role in turning back the left and right radical totalitarian tide are of enormous importance, but I do feel that his relevance extends beyond this. For me it was hugely significant that he was much concerned (as Skidelsky points out in the article) with probability, causality and uncertainty as the context of all social and historical action. In an immeasurably more modest fashion those were the very same themes that I was engaged with when coming to a settled understanding of the study of history, its nature, role and scope. I felt that what Keynes said about economic action was universally true of all sectors of human activity. Our historical stage is a very Keynesian stage. So, for me, it is only in this narrow sense of re-encountering a possibly very terrifying collapse of trust in the economic structures that it could be said that Keynes has again become relevant - he never stopped being relevant.

Like swimmers into cleanness leaping

2008-12-17T08:27:00.003+02:00

I only too rarely read Finnish literature. I had my fill of the classics very early on and have barely kept abreast of the contemporary scene. Though those books that have made an impression have made a strong one. I’m now in the middle of Sofi Oksanen’s “Puhdistus”. Grim, grim text – the immediate context being the introduction of Stalinism into a civil society, the violence against women, the horrible scars that history leaves. Amazingly well written, such economical, beautiful language. While reading the first pages I was struck by the universal theme of loss of innocence that also began to emerge from the story. This is of course something that concerns all of us: we all are hardened, at least to a degree, we all get cynical, at least to a degree, we all get callous, at least to a degree. But beyond this ordinary coarsening in this fundamentally harsh world there are whole categories of experience that we modern Westerners have largely escaped, that we scarcely believe possible. This does not mean that we would be immune to them, or that we, or our descendants would have a guarantee of never encountering them. We have been lucky in the blind accident of our historical moment. That is all.

Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do

2008-12-12T15:30:00.003+02:00

We would urgently need a coherent theoretical framework to replace the crude market faith that is currently becoming more and more obsolete. Well, actually intellectually it has always been obsolete, it was born obsolete, but immense concentrations of power will support and create belief structures around them. We can see this reflex in the immense cohorts of semi- or partially educated market enthusiasts on the Web. (Not to talk about the hate filled American right wing talk radio whose main role in the world is I guess to keep corporate interests safe, never mind the unborn fetuses or Darwin in the last analysis.) However wrong, power speaks loudly - and in the context of market economy, it is not even completely wrong. Strictly regulated markets do work (and are not too unstable to create overwhelming social backlashes). So, what is needed is a subtle, intellectually flexible approach - a sane middle way. Now should I hold my breath?

Surprised by joy

2008-11-14T18:04:00.004+02:00

A striking and pleasant sight on this morning's rush hour train: two high school boys, not more than 16 years old, very obviously more than friends. Nothing particular really one might say and surely even today they were braving something (though certainly not with an air of proving any point, just engaging in private happiness quite unselfconsciously). But I was suddenly struck by the thought of how much more they would have been braving mere 20 years ago (actually the whole scene would have been pretty much unimaginable) - there truly is a strong, forceful wave of tolerance and reason spreading through the younger generations all over the industrialized world. And in that moment I felt - perhaps a non sequitur - that there still is vitality and selfconfidence in the old enlightenment West. The tide of emancipation still is advancing, still alive.

Happy days are here again?

2008-11-05T08:00:00.006+02:00

Even two months ago I would not have thought it really crucial which candidate would be elected to be the president of the USA. Two months can be a very long time. I guess it has not been truly realized how tremendous these Wall Street tremors have been. With a less imaginitive and interventionist Federal Reserve we might already been a long way into a global depression. These are very dangerous times, almost comparable to the times of Roosevelt and Churchill - whose election to power was the proof of the vitality and self-confidence of the liberal West. Maybe this decision is a similar sign. So perhaps we would then get the USA back to the serious business of leading the Western alliance - the moment of hyperpowerdom and unilateralist hubris passed quickly but so much damage was made in that short time. Such a disastrous abandonment of wisdom and moderation by the American nationalist right with their aggressive America firstism: no real understanding, no long views. I have now CCR on, the voice of America - such a good feeling to feel the optimism and hope radiating once again from across the Atlantic. One only wonders how long it takes before the freezing cold winds of history will wipe this optimism away. Well, just perhaps not this time.

Long eight years

2008-11-04T12:57:00.007+02:00

By the year 2000 I had become very distanced from party politics and ideology that once were unreally important and meaningful for me. I had ended up - after all the emotional upheavals and dramatic shifts - liberal, vaguely centre left, ironically quite in bearing with my personal background and the positions that I had originally begun with. But I was very certainly not much interested in concrete centre left politics and parties. I believed that all that was relatively irrelevant and distasteful. I simply - comfortably - assumed that though unpleasant things constantly occurred and unpleasant parties and politicians kept winning offices that social progress would nevertheless continue, not steadily, not overtly but all the while. I also believed that party politics were largely irrelevant to that progress, that the political process would eventually mirror this grassroots advance, maybe not satisfactorily or gratifyingly but nevertheless things would get better, even if gradually, even if messily.

It took the administration of George W. Bush to persuade me otherwise. Suddenly I was re-politized, at times even mesmerized by the spectacular shipwreck of the American (and to a large degree, Western) political process. I’m no anti-American – I have been a steady liberal cold warrior (having doubts only now) and have seen the American leadership and power as essential for our Western civilization and its liberal and humanistic values. I had just not realized how far the corruption had gone, how quickly the enlightenment values of the American revolution were dissipating and the society and politics getting more plutocratic, the citizens more distanced from elite politics and irrational fundamentalism and anti-empirism growing stronger. These eight years have certainly been an education to all of us. Perhaps today will finally mark the turn of the tide. Much is resting on a single, politically enigmatic, relatively inexperienced person faced with powerful structural counterforces and a national moral – and financial – bankruptcy. A task not to be envied.

Ayn Rand is not good for you

2008-10-24T19:41:00.005+03:00

We have now the spectacle of even Alan Greenspan going for more regulation of the market. O tempora o mores, I suppose. Perhaps this strange sight signals - whatever the level of destruction of this possibly very deep and exceptional downturn - that a return to some degree of sanity has finally begun. It is not that these collapses would not have been foreseen and forecast - they were, by many anxious and worried observers. It is just that reason went overboard with the long bull market, as it inevitably will in connection with any complex large scale human activity, and especially when it comes to the market place. It is self-evidently a feature, not a bug. That is why we desperately will always need balancing forces, safety nets, income transfers, progressive taxation and so on - not only do they keep the society open for fair competition and high social mobility but they also guarantee a certain, basic and crucial level of stability that is inherently missing from raw capitalism. In the last analysis these factors are the fundamental foundation of any effectively functioning and flourishing market economy. It is the very success of social democracy that I guess makes the market enthusiasts so blind to its salutary effects. History, our brutal human history, has a knack though of reminding us of the realities every now and then. Hopefully we will escape now with only a reminder - it seems quite possible that much worse things could be on offer. Interesting times certainly.

Don't let them crash

2008-10-10T08:07:00.005+03:00

Periodically capitalism must be saved from itself - the invisible hand is very shaky when left unsupervised. And that's exactly what has been done in these last euphoric and hubristic decades that continued the party, hmm, the orgy that Reagan and Thatcher began. Well, it's hangover time now. Of course things would be fine and capitalism would work smoothly without supervision and regulation if only people would always behave rationally and longsightedly. So would have communism. But we are what we are and will always need checks and balances as long as we stay human. It would be natural in this crisis then to let these arrogant institutions and their once so all-knowing and self-righteous masters fail instead of making them protected state wards. But that would be a mistake - we should never forget that the welfare state and the social democratic compromize worked only because they provided a workable mechanism to harness capitalism for genuine overall good of the community. Without that engine, energy and dynamism it would not have been possible to create a more humane, a more equal society. We are only good in sharing abundance: scarcity will eventually lead to injustice and authoritarianism. So, under proper supervision capitalism can be made work and be made work well. Of course, no-one seems to know how bad things have now gone: it might be possible that even quite apocalyptic changes may happen. But hopefully the governments can once again save capitalism from itself and perhaps remember the lesson better and for much longer this time. This crisis was only too well foreseen and forecast - the hubris and folly was just too strong for reason to penetrate and disinflate.

On social liberalism

2008-09-18T10:31:00.004+03:00

I mostly vote for the Social Democrats, occasionally also for the Greens - in the last election in Finland I seriously considered our (very) moderate Conservative Party (Kokoomus) and still remember fondly the Young Finns of the early and mid-nineties (as overly market enthusiastic as they were). But none of these parties correspond very exactly with my own social liberal preferences though you certainly can find bits and pieces in all of them. Social Democracy is of course the closest equivalent with its historical compromise with market economy and its very effective combination of social justice with dynamic economy (that is now under ever increasing threat). Still, the socialist ethos has never felt very close to me with those certain even quite crude anti-elitist tendencies and mindsets of the tradition (the Finnish term is much more descriptive – “herraviha”). Perhaps that also comes from my Southern Ostrobothnian background , the naturally egalitarian and self-confident Province certainly has never felt the need to envy anyone or to harbour bitter grudges over generations…

For me equality is essentially the equality of opportunity. And it doesn’t mean that if one poor child out of a thousand that combines talent with luck succeeds that we would have achieved the equality of opportunity. As we well know, both talent and luck are equally distributed among both poor and wealthy children, so what we need is a fair chance for all poor children. And this then really needs certain strong social democratic structures to be established in the society: significant income redistribution, mixed economy, strong safety nets, progressive taxation, open high quality education and health care systems and so on. But the goal cannot be the forced equality of outcome – we naturally do have different talents, different luck, even different natures and inclinations. A free and fair social competition will produce relative losers and winners – this is both inevitable and beneficial. We need to guard against the elites that will always have the human instinct for monopolies and shutting down of the competition but we also need to guard against too forceful and also in itself elitistic levelling of the society. So, liberty is the highest value for me, not equality (as crucial as it is), but a society cannot be free unless a great majority of its citizens have a level playing field and are free to pursuit success according to their own inclinations and capabilities.

Après moi - the government bailout

2008-09-17T08:25:00.004+03:00

It has been once again proven in the cause of this present financial turmoil that the modern state cannot allow systemic economical failure. Moral hazard is a feature of the system, not an external bug. Profits will always be for privatization and losses, if big enough, will always be socialized. This empirically proven state of affairs will of course not prevent the adored corporate leaders to lecture about the negative effects of state intervention once the good times have returned. Business has very short and selective memory. So, in the last analysis our modern market economy is founded on the support of the modern social democratic state without which it could not thrive. It desperately needs strict regulation and oversight that guarantee a certain basic stability and predictability. It could not even be otherwise given our shortsighted and greedy human nature. Of course this also provides the assorted libertarians and other free market fundamentalists with a permanent escape clause: the free market will never be completely free, it simply cannot be so - there will never be uncontaminated laboratory conditions for capitalism, so the libertarians will always be able to say that without that contamination of public intervention, the system would have worked "perfectly". Oh dear, how much this intellectual nonsense reminds me of Marxism-Leninism - no falsifiability, pure intellectually immature circular logic supported by ideological fervour and nothing else.

Sub species aeternitatis

2008-09-04T11:09:00.003+03:00

Modern Western philosophy has always been a problematic but fascinating subject for me - there has basically been a kind of love-hate relationship. On one hand it is hard to imagine more serious, more worthwhile inquiry but on the other hand you get such a sense of unreality to see these artificial systems of language perform docile logical tricks. That is very strongly put and my capabilities are not nearly enough to see how justified this attitude really is. It just seems self-evident that we are not - literally - humanly able to ground ourselves universally and timelessly - and this is what the great, original synthesists have tried from Descartes via Leibnitz and Spinoza on towards Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, the usual army of the unalterable law with mad Friedrich jeering on the sidelines and the analytic Anglo-Saxons seeing no point to the enterprise in the first place (having their own impossible agenda). A strange hubristic tradition. Art on the other hand has always seemed more, not less, universal to me, starting from a more particular, more fundamental point, and being then more essentially grounded if less logical, less house trained. So, I would change Plato's order, and see art as essential and philosophy, at least potentially, as distracting us from our serious inquiry...

Questions of style

2008-08-31T11:37:00.009+03:00

It took a long time to get rid of the History Department snobbery concerning biography but in time I have come to realize that an individual person is one of the best angles available for getting an informative look on an era. This notwithstanding all those well known and legitimate enough reservations - you probably can never really capture an individual experience and so all text will inevitably be misleading and inaccurate thus often raising subjectivity to a second degree. So there is no straight line from an individual life to its cultural and temporal context, but then there is none available for any kind of historical study - which is not only a loss, but sometimes a significant gain. I am currently in the middle of Antonia Fraser's life of Marie Antoinette, which is competent enough, I'm sure at places even a brilliant case for the defence though her approach has never been greatly to my taste. There is one player permanently out of the scene, namely the 99% of French society whose appearance would perhaps go a long distance in explaining the personal tragedy of this largely blameless but very foolish person. Of course, I have in any case very little sympathy for the aristocracy of the ancien regimé, those decadent painted dolls that, yes, were more a concequence than the cause of the universal awfulness and injustice of the time - but other contemporary tragedies were even worse and unimaginably more numerous.

Anyway, this book surely is the one Sophie Coppola read. When her film came out it didn't receive a very warm welcome from the critics. I suppose the general verdict was that it had some style but no substance and gravitas which it should have had given its famous and portentous historical context. Well, I thought it was brilliant. I have some difficulties in seeing film as a great art form, but it surely best achieves greatness when it gets the form right, never mind the content (as far as we can meaningfully make the distinction, which is mostly not very far). That is how my sense of esthetics works: form can be the substance, a frivolous approach can lead to a great virtuosity of skill and thus also to deep meaningfullness. In the film this strange era is approached from a very eccentric, unreal angle (which is also how the study of history fundamentally works, even if the academia is never as free as art, odd how ashamed historians are of their craft's near relatives...) - and illuminated in a very understated way. It is a very stylish film and thus a very good film. The famous shot of the pair of Nike runners among Marie Antoinette's shoe collection was not frivolous postmodernism for me but a striking statement about our universal experience of being in time (not to mention some more obvious similarities between two epochs of decadence and over concumption). This is to overstate the case, but overstatement is surely a legitimate reading here. An excellent film indeed, unique almost in its capability to express with a sophisticated, light touch certain aspects of history that academic research would have great difficulties in expressing.

So be merry, so be dead

2008-08-12T11:43:00.004+03:00

For my fortieth birthday this summer I wished for a reprint of Paul Fussell's classic The Great War and Modern Memory. It was such a remarkable, even shattering experience to encounter it shortly after I had begun my studies in Helsinki in the late 80's. Of course, I already then found the idea of Liberal England strangely sympathetic and was aware of its strange death during the nightmares of the 20th century - but Fussell brought that theme to life in a spectacular fashion. I still largely accept his view on the importance of the WW1 to modern experience.

This is not to say that these concepts - like the "strange death" of liberal England - would not be outside impositions, they are, but currently we don't have any other means to bring coherance and life to history which is the challenge that a book like The Great War and Modern Memory so brilliantly meets. It is only too bad that most modern historians seem largely unaware that there even is a problem here - perhaps that is due to the unfortunate side effects of postmodernism. In comparison to the current crew of mainstream historians literary history like it was written by people like Fussell or Bergonzi is sheer intellectual pleasure, such wide range and such intellectual confidence is very rarely seen any more.

Inspired by Fussell, I'm am going round through these by now familiar landscapes. I am currently in the middle of Vera Brittain's classic "Testament of Youth", and no doubt "Goodbye to All That", "Undertones of War" and Sassoon's memoirs will follow later. Strange how this particular loss of innocence seems to echo through the decades for so many people and into so many different circumstances. Of course, it was a very narrow section of people, not very representative in any sense, but for them history had devised a trap the like of which has not often been seen.

They were the fruit of the high, unreal civilization of liberal England, and it is not easy not to be moved by images such as Vera Brittain's visit in July 1914 to the public school of her beloved brother and her gifted fiance - and watching them march in the Officer's Training Corps in the middle of that brilliantly beautiful summer. Surely a strange quietness in the blue sky and in the windless trees there, boys' cries muffled by the still, unmoving air... Much of the modern cynicism, pessimism and despair originated in the mad slaughter of these innocents.

In undoubtedly a very disproportionate way I identified exceptionally intensely with that experience, feeling the loss of a very protected innocence myself and having also a sense of bitter suffering and mute, helpless endurance. Of all the various figures, poets and writers, it is then Charles Sorley that stood out most painfully. His eighteen to my eighteen was a humiliating contrast. I had barely been able to formulate the need for a coherent voice, a coherent person - and there he was in his brilliant letters: a sane, sensitive, balanced, proportionate, authorititave voice. Everything I so burningly was not.

Strangely history echoes through our lives, our experiences. I was of course overly romantic, not making justice to the actual occurrances, the actual persons. But even now Sorley cannot but feel such a rounded, brilliant figure, such loss to the world, his eighteen being easily more than a match to my forty even though the competition is slightly more even now... What would he have done, what would he have written - such irreplaceable loss. Or Rosenberg, or Owen. Not representative people at all, but in their unrepresentativeness surely very crucial to our modern experience. Unmoored as we are, no longer having faith in coherance and progress, in art being the way forward for the whole civilization - lost in no-man's-land. They point, illuminate the way how we ended up there.

No permanent home here

2008-07-09T11:40:00.003+03:00

It is very difficult to describe the atmosphere, the ethos of Finnish Pietism (herännäisyys) to outsiders. Harsh modernity has largely compressed Christianity either to bland mainstream churches going through the motions or to intellectually shrivelled, panicky fundamentalism. Those two versions, competing in shallowness, are familiar to all. Mysticism escapes this fruitless dichotomy, all fruitless dichotomies. Listening to Zion's Songs (Siionin virret), those amazing cadences of folk melodies from the 18th and 19th centuries, one is amazed that there still is, in this ice cold human world, forms of Christianity that can unite esthetics and ethics (almost in quasi-Eliotian way), that can make faith even now, even today, an intellectually relevant position. Incredibly for any human organization, Finnish Pietism has renounced power and manipulation, thus stubbornly maintaining a living connection to that amazing vision of universal redemption two thousand years ago - through weakness and powerless longing towards the true homeland, the loving absolute. Grace is not earned, not conquered, not owned, not maintained by human power, nor mediated by human hands. A beautiful, sad, living vision, a fit philosophy. This comment comes partially from outside, more Athens than Jerusalem surely in me, but a part of me has never left, and never will. Such strange thing, such luck to have encountered a living, credible form of Christianity - so easy to think these sorry days that none exist.

Vita brevis

2008-06-26T14:50:00.004+03:00

It is strange to encounter milestones in one's life that so short time ago seemed unimaginable. We begin in timelessness and then are caught by that strong stream that does not remain the same though it keeps the name. I would imagine that we end by returning to a kind of timelessness: the stream goes on but we drift downwards, are left behind, not any more interested in what is to come. In that sense this is the swift mid part with very little time for reflection and distance, being in mid-arc, mid-flight. Earlier one had the illusion of finality, of reaching the finished state - I don't believe that this is so for any person, not for me certainly, and it would surely not be very satisfactory state of affairs, not to change, not to journey on. Our experience here is very strange, concrete and fickle, stable and ever changing, inexplicable at heart.

Jam tomorrow

2008-05-22T10:19:00.006+03:00

One of the bright spots of this unexpectedly tough spring has been the re-reading of Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Such magnificent voice. He was certainly no saint and had many unpleasant traits (as we all do), many blind spots. No matter: integrity, honesty and tolerance will shine through. We have not seen his like since, not many ages have. Curiously it was his democratic socialism that striked me this time quite powerfully: how decent, how civilized would his ideal society be. Especially in comparison with us: our hedonistic, uncaring, semi-sadistic consumer society based on capital and profit. Surely, if we were better, we would be Orwellian socialists, somewhat austere, tolerant and informal, arguing about gardening and perfect cups of tea over pints of bitter before the last orders - that come early in the evening, then vanishing into the soft English night still discussing in good humour, perfectly equal, perfectly free...

But we are not better, we are what we are, and so the social democrats had to solve the class problem by making almost everyone a part of the middle class by taxation, welfare structures and decent universal education. And when almost everyone became middle class, they promptly shod any traces of socialist inclinations - which is why the democratic left is in such serious intellectual (if not always electoral) difficulties in most of the West. And now that the social democratic balance of interests is slowly but surely eroding in favour of capital and corporations, there is no vibrant intellectual alternative, no credible voice of dissent and progress, unlike in Orwell's own era. I wonder what he would now say? In any case, his proposition I suppose was never really on offer - we are what we are. Having stumbled into the social democratic solution (I am still amazed how well functioning that set of balances were: no actor too strong, no interest pre-dominant) we are now stumbling out of it, irresponsibly speeding ahead towards who knows what further collapses of morality and ethics.

Duty and virtue

2008-04-30T10:45:00.002+03:00

Following even distantly the modern liberal democratic political process you are stricken how decadent and corrupt we have become. The impulses of Christianity and the Enlightenment are growing ever weaker. What we mostly have left are possessions, a hedonistic drive towards more and more comfort and entertainment cynically manipulated by the blind, shortsighted elites. The most rapid descent appears to be in progress in the USA: the high enlightened principles of the American Revolution are rapidly vanishing in front of our eyes, the Bush administration has brutally effectively enlarged the realm of possibilities for rolling back the spirit of that great rebellion against the arbitrary power of the executive. This is not to say that there once was a halcyon time when virtue ruled – human governance is inevitably a corrupt process and without a certain earthy sense of pragmatism the results can be quite frightening. But you do have, you must have, countering ideals, high goals, a code of ethics, of morality, a sense of boundaries. Without this counterforce the government, the political process will rot to the core. A healthy balance is needed, but currently the social and economical structures don’t produce responsible politicians and good citizens – they don’t produze citizens at all, they produce consumers. There is no balance.

Every day on this planet is an astonishing collapse of morality. Every week die 250 000 children under the age of 10. Consider that for a moment, the reality of that description. There is a huge, an unimaginable amount of human suffering in the world that we already have the physical means to prevent. If we are lucky, if the civilizational progress will continue (rather debatable proposition at the moment) we will one day be condemned as coldblooded, callous murderers. It is a small comfort that there is a partial defence for this - namely that wickedness is an inbuilt feature of all human organization, that it is does not come from outside and is not in our current power to prevent. From a moral perspective that is no defence. We desperately need ideals, we need a sense of duty, a concept of virtue, an understanding of the necessity of ethical boundaries. Without those influences our existence will become a pointless combination of sadism and hedonism, and eventually a moral collapse will lead to a physical one. We can’t built a lasting civilization on consumption and profit.

His dark familiar

2008-04-08T10:53:00.005+03:00

I have been keeping quality company during my unpleasantly long work trips these last few days: a selection of Orwell's essays and journalism preceded by Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Reading Orwell's heavenly prose is not only a huge pleasure but somewhat challenging too - any personal writing seems especially wooden and clumsy in that particular comparison. There really are few things in the world to compare with good writing, nor many skills that I would rate higher. (Come to think, I can't name one.) Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books that I have first encountered too early: I think I must have read it when I was 13 or 14. These added years have added scope and it is strange to find completely new echoes and meanings in that classic text. I don't really know any wider scope than fiction, it is the widest scope, widest, most serious view that I have encountered. Perhaps philosophy would be a contender if someone hadn't absolutely forbidden philosophers to write about the nature and structure of the immediate human experience in meaningful language. (Of course some have luckily disobeyed, like poor Friedrich, for instance.) So, even in the midst of these busy days with their scattered busy trivia I have been able to keep contact with essential matters, the long views - not a bad achievement as they go, as much as one would hope for a much more relevant, essential professional life to accompany a most relevant, essential private life.

From Athens via Jerusalem to the shopping mall

2008-03-14T09:55:00.000+02:00

For me history is at the centre - it is the central science, the central study. In comparison physics seems a simple if esoteric field, mathematics a self-evident logical game with only fairly mechanical complexities etc. etc. About the structure and workings of the subject matters of all natural sciences we understand so much more than about our inexplicable human experience in the world. We have next to no penetration of this chaotic process, being immersed in it, seeing only dimly and never far. We have ever more minute comprehension of the nature and dimensions of space-time but have no theory of historical causation. We can explain the physical universe in the language of hard science but can't do the same for the smallest of historical events. Perhaps that is why we have only a very limited perception of the strangeness of our path, of this mad shooting arc that has brought us to this completely unique new society, only mere decades old. One can only wonder what is yet to come - will the explosion into more complexity continue or will it all come to arupt halt at some stage? In any case there is no control of our direction, we ride a huge wild wave without any meaningful way to influence its course.

La trahison des clercs

2008-02-04T09:43:00.000+02:00

In the course of the bonfire of decencies that has been the American political process in recent years, we were famously informed that "facts on the ground don't matter". And it has been the bewildered complaint of the derailed progressive forces that this attitude is not only accepted but actively practiced by increasing proportions of the mainstream media. Facts are not reported, controversies are - there are only conflicting interpretations, conflicting languages that are cited, and increasingly few attempts are made to evaluate these often totally absurd claims against reality. No doubt this is largely an economic phenomenon: the modern media is very tightly integrated to corporate structures, to these gigantic, unimaginable concentrations of wealth and power - which of course will inevitably corrupt any intellectual enterprise. But I think the attack has been so deadly because it has been two pronged all the while, and the other thrust has come from the back: the humanities have now been dominated for decades by a very debased form of postmodernity that indeed does replace the words like "facts" and "reality" within quotation marks having no legitimate meaning. In the current academic folk religion in the literature and media departments reality has no substance and fundamentally only power is the meaningful settler of any disputes. Can we then blame the poor journalists for their education?

Now of course we know that nothing that Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault and other captains of the army of unalterable law ever wrote challenged the physical reality in any way. Findings of physics, the laws of mathematics are perfectly, even religiously protected by these texts - physical facts remain as objective as ever and reality as real and robust as it has always been. This has been the correct fall back position of most defenders of this complicated web of continental philosophies. The problem is of course that on the ground this is hardly ever even mentioned as of course it would delegate these much trumpeted findings to somewhat more humble level. Facts are as solid and trustworthy as as they have ever been but there are some great complications in formulating them in human language. And it is these intricate complications that the various streams of postmodern thought have helpfully clarified. Of course, they have done this in as unclear and messy language as humanly possible - and in the process whether then intentionally or not hiding the fact that these new insights are hardly very revolutionary at all. (It is no wonder that postmodern thought has so docilely co-existed with the triumph of free market orthodoxy.) Needless to say these complicated philosophical insights have virtually no importance to the mundane every day process of reporting and analysing events.

So, progress is currently bogged down in two front war (and not doing particularly well in either). Just when facts are crucially important, when truth should be spoken to power, we discover that "facts" are irrelevant and "truth" is an oppressive, anti-pluralist concept. Progress itself is seen as a dangerous, hegemonic concept and a direct cause for the calamities of the 20th century - from Kant and Mill you somehow get straight to Auschwitz (as nonsensical as it is to think so). One should not wonder that the chief beneficiary of this collapse of selfconfidence are the modern, atavistic conservative forces supported and created by the blind and self-destructive structures of capital. Of course we are now seeing many signs of waning of the force of this great bundle of theories: scholastism has been quite exhausted by now -the seats of power have been conquered but hardly anything else very meaningful. All that needed to be written and what was intellectually valuable was essentially said already by the late 1970's. What we now have in humanities, three long decades later, seems to be a gigantic cul-de-sac, a huge waste of intellectual energy, the main legacy of which seems to be only the undermining of enlightenment values and all faith in political progress.

Beautiful lofty things

2008-01-23T11:18:00.003+02:00

It is curious how often it seems necessary to hold a one sided, impossibly rosy view of the human nature in order to have progressive views of society and history – and how often it is seen reasonable that just to show otherwise is enough to disprove this progressivism. Certainly there is much else in us than just pure drives towards understanding, harmony and reason: there are dark, atavistic, animal impulses in the depths of all our minds. A large part of our integral experience is completely amoral. Our conscious being is ephemeral, disjointed, our experience far from unified, we exist only partially and are only too often panicky, fearful and aggressive, powered by ancient reflexes for flight or fight. There are grasping, ugly creatures within all of us, waiting for their chance to emerge and take control.

These instincts can’t be denied or willed out of existence (and it would be disastrous to even try), but all the same, their mere existence is surely no argument. We do have countering forces, intelligence, will to meaning and understanding, instincts for protection and solidarity, for beauty and truth, moments of coherence. We remain poised, seeing far beyond the prison walls, a kind of experiment: what will once emerge out of these disjointed beings? I would not think that this disharmony, this uneasy equilibrium would be satisfactory as a permanent solution, as much edge as it does give to our wild, untamed lives.

Time present and time past

2008-01-16T08:46:00.001+02:00

The grandparents of my parents were children of the last great famine in Western Europe. In the late 1860's several concequent bad harvests led to widespread starvation and disease, and almost 10% of the population of Finland died. It can be said that I have been largely formed by people in whose immediate historical memory this disaster was. There is thus a tenuous living connection that undoubtedly will no more be carried over to the next generation. Our son was born ten months ago into a dynamic, postmodern and cosmopolitan high-tech society that is busily consuming and being amused by the global entertainment industry. He will have no real connection with that passed away rural civilization.

It is in fact almost inconceivable to think that this land of brightly lit shopping malls and cutting edge mobile techonology was starving to death by the roadsides only mere five generations ago. Certainly this is not much thought about now: we occupy ourselves almost entirely with the present and the near future. The speed is too high, too dangerous for any meaningful reflection. So much has changed so quickly. I myself - as can be seen so clearly in retrospect - witnessed the ending of the last remnants of the rural Ostrobothnia that was still the unquestioned mental and cultural background of my parents. This huge change happened with astonishing speed largely only after the Second World War with the social change skipping industrialization and shifting the emphasis directly from agriculture to services in one generation. I still believe that I have the feel, the texture of that rural civilization that now has vanished. It is a wild ride we are on, uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

Many believe that there is no use in remembering even this quite recent past, only the previous half hour in historical terms - certainly such remembrance can sometimes hinder finding new perspectives and new solutions to largely unprecedented social situations. Still, without this long view we would surely get a wrong understanding of our position (on the crest of a huge wave racing towards an unknown destination), we would see the current moment out of all proportion, one-dimensional and shallow. It is hard to believe, even if civilization will eventually persist, that we are now done with all collapses and calamities. There is too little behind us though to know anything for sure: this mad, chaotic progress is only a few centuries old - there is no way of predicting how this process will continue or whether it will continue at all.

In any case it is difficult not to feel half-nostalgic about those times and meanings that were once so real and immediate and which now seem unimaginably distant and strange. I suppose it is more the fact of passing than the content of what has passed: most things are much better now. But so much has so easily vanished from living memory, and this is what will happen to our moment too - hard to imagine though that anyone would feel any nostalgia about this society but that no doubt also depends on what's to come.

The great tradition

2008-01-09T11:58:00.000+02:00

I was recently reading a biography of George Eliot and was much struck by the majesty of the turn of the British non-conformist intellectual elite towards political liberalism, agnosticism and progress during the middle part of the 19th century. Yes, this great shift surely was absurdly highminded, demanding impossible moral and intellectual rigidity (and frigidity) from people, expecting things not remotely possible in this fallen world, doing not only much good but also much harm in the process. This said, compared with the contemporary high Tory wallowing in the miserableness of the human condition, there is a tone of great human decency in this partly absurd wish to create (and the expectation of seeing) a new Jerusalem on Earth. They were momentous times indeed and we still do feel the impact of this great hope for improvement and progress - even if it is ever weakening, being gradually drowned by the current Western orgy of consumerism and materialism. Of course, coming from the liberal Christian background of modern Finnish Pietism, there is much that is familiar with this peculiarly Protestant form of secular longing for a proper home in this world. There is an unmistakeable continuum of thought originating both in the sources of the Reformation and in the Reformation itself that is still supporting progressive political structures around the world - surely, naturally, getting gradually fainter as is any faith in conscious progress.

The winged chariot sung

2008-01-04T10:09:00.002+02:00

It was on remarkably many levels that the news of the death of Jaan Kross were felt. Such an irreplaceable loss. Being an Estophile his unique broad perspective on his native country has of course been hugely influential in forming a personal understanding on Estonian history and culture. Still, I did not read him for information but for art: the excellent Finnish translations brought out the majestic rhythm of the language, the intricate beauty of the sentences. The texture is dense and deep - and the interplay between theme and language is mostly flawless. The result is a slow, universal, almost a mystical beat behind the surface action that the reader becomes only gradually aware of: a huge canvas is painted with sparse, understated strokes. The themes themselves were mostly Estonian but his was a universal Western voice, concerned with our particular modern predicament of unmoored individuals in time, at the mercy of history. There are not many such writers in any generation and it was quite a miracle that such an authoritative Western voice would be coming from such a small nation - quite like the improbable emergence of Sibelius from the nationalistically awakened and in many ways narrow confines of Finland. Such a body of work, such a life - we can only be grateful and priviledged to have been able to share even if only partially this majestic, polyphonic historical and cultural perspective.

Tempus adest gratiae

2007-12-19T11:49:00.002+02:00

I must confess to liking the Christmas time. Perhaps it is due to the awful darkness of the sub-arctic winter (these days we don’t even reliably get permanent snow to Southern Finland before January which makes the 20 hours long night pitch dark and the 4 hours long “day” quite dismal). So, all lights and candles are very welcome in the midst of this darkness. But, in some respects, so is the message of that ancient story. Christianity is much, or more accurately, totally, disfigured by the various official Christian churches and sects and their incredibly primitive dogmas and superstitions. Any average Dawkinsian atheist can blow away the Bible as a science (or even philosophy) book along with all the assorted fundamentalists and traditionalists that read it as the literal word of their literal, small minded "God".

But I would argue that something immeasurably valuable of all the world religions escapes their dismal followers with their dismal sects and power structures: and so I do seriously believe that heavens really did open to the humankind two thousand years ago, regardless of any empirical evidence for or against. This particular message of forgiveness and redemption echoes on even through all these organizations and dogmas that seem as if designed to silence it.

Gaudete, Christus est natus...

Confessions of a book addict

2007-11-19T19:35:00.001+02:00

It is only quite lately that I have considered that my intense relationship with reading could perhaps be seen as somewhat eccentric. It has been such an integral part of my life that I haven't really noticed my reading habit as anything odd. By the age of eleven I already had a system set: there were two libraries that I would visit weekly, our own municipal library and the provincial library in Seinäjoki. I would have a maximum limit of eight books for each visit and in most times I reached that limit. That made on average ca 13-16 books per week for about ten years. (How that was manageable, I don't know.)

About the time of my tenth birthday I had already exhausted the children's department and had moved on to adult shelves. So, I was a true addict already then, an escape artist, with my thoughts most of the time anywhere else than in the fairly grim reality that was my life those times. Anything went: thrillers, detective stories, serious novels, fantasy, science fiction, history, biography, even poetry already in those early days - I was not a discriminating reader, if anything the preference was for the lighter stuff that I now see was often horribly badly written.

This I suppose is still fairly understandable - I was growing up in any case, gradually getting more interested in more than mere escape, reflecting, conciling books with experience and vice versa. But that magical initial burst is still quite inexlicable to me: around the age of 8 years I read all the books we had at home (well, not quite all: I mostly skipped, strangely, the plentiful religious literature there was). For the time and place we had a wide selection with the emphasis on the classic Finnish fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. This selection was combined with an utter respect for books and learning that no doubt is getting quite rare these days. So there I was, compulsively reading Kivi, Canth, Jotuni, Kauppis-Heikki, Aho, Lehtonen, Leinonen and many others: an 8 year old boy from a very sheltered home background - I surely couldn't understand anything I was reading about.

It was long ago, I have changed and can now hardly remember what I was searching for, but I do remember that the experience really was magical, strange, compulsive - I had found a gate and gone through it and have since never returned, or glanced back.

For that first burst I have no real explanation - afterwards and even partly simultaneously I did go for conventional children's literature which I could genuinely understand and enjoy, but I did enjoy also those other books at home, having clear preferences and favourites among them, though I certainly couldn't have understood much of those serious adult motivations and complexities of language and meaning. Since that long bygone time reading has been an integral part of my life, a central part. In my twenties I averaged I think about a book per day. I switched to English around my 19th birthday, basically for the wider selection: Helsinki City Library, University Library and Student Library were paradises for me, I remember feeling drunk at the mere sight of the endless, dusty shelves of the Student Library Book Storage. Great flames in pitch dark were libraries for me during that bleak time. Even these days I think I read on average about a couple of books per week navigating still regularly back to those self-same beacons.

Themes have changed though - escape gave gradually way to intellectual search which in turn has been much replaced by more independent and detached reflection. I'm now not able to read badly written fiction or clumsily thought out, shallow factual studies. Fiction and history are the main interests, I have overcome my snobbish (History Department) disdain of biography (if well written and thought). I can still enjoy good thrillers (say Barbara Vine) or thoughtful science fiction (in many ways a more politically and socially relevant genre than mainstream fiction that has largely lost its intellectual self-confidence and scope in the post-modern era), but altogether the subject matter is more serious and fiction is now in a distinct minority (poetry is something separate again, intensely meaningful but in some sense hardly literature for me, I have a very narrow selection of poems and poets that I return to again and again).

Writing this I notice that I find it very hard to describe the actual, concrete meaning of books to me, the actual texture of the feeling of reading, the rush - the polyphony of voices, of angles, the added scope, the limitless complexities of language, meaning and experience... In some sense all texts are speculative fiction, whether they are fiction or not, just as in some sense our lives are a speculation, a gamble - we are provisional and shifting, never fixed and permanent. We see myriad possibilities but no absolute solutions. So I read sceptically and critically but with an open mind and suspended judgement, coming only to provisional conclusions, trying to take in all possibilities, all meanings. As impossible as it is. In many respects reading has been my true occupation all these years: I have kept endlessly travelling through strange landscapes while supporting myself by in comparison trivial occupations. At first it was a panicky escape, but lucky in direction (at a time when luck seemed to be in very short supply). Though not to paint any overly rosy image: for long, immensely painful years there was no reconciliation between mind and body, between intelligence and experience, I was immature, uneven, only partially a real person.

I have changed much since, for the better, being now more settled, intellectually more self-confident (though remaining an abysmally poor writer as always), pursuing now the origin and course of love, and not fundamentally meaningless intellectual abstractions. But to this day I have remained throughly addicted, throughly hooked, still spending long hours somewhere else, with this glorious dialogue and two-way interpretation that is reading. I am now in much less of a hurry and much more inclined to draw more permanent conclusions, thus narrowing the scope - it is not possible ever to reach any real certainty, so we have to settle with what limited understandings we can have in this world. Writers like George Eliot and E.M.Forster have become the lodestars: I keep trying to connect, to reconcile, to comprehend our experience in a liberal, open-ended fashion, avoiding absolutes and unsupported certainties. It has been a strange pilgrimage through a rapidly passing civilization - but with such excellent, incomparably grand company. I can't imagine how it would be without this added scope, without these long views.

That madcap Lord Mayor of London

2007-11-02T23:53:00.000+02:00

The last 18 months have been an education. For the first time in life to lose a truly close person without any regard to any personal wishes on the matter was an admirably clear lesson of the limits of this world. Then to have welcomed a new person here, utterly vulnerable, without any real guarantees whatsoever of being able to protect his way has been a logical continuation of that selfsame lesson. This is what we have here, at maximum, and these things, these people, are what we will lose, one way or the other. Much of our human activity is designed to enable us to forget this state of affairs. But it is the wildest, unsafest ride imaginable and you have to be stubbornly narrow indeed to remain unaware of this. The terms are brutally harsh but in this brief span there is admittedly some tragic grandeur - and also moments of pure exhilaration in not having any safety nets available: a strange journey through the wildness.

Liberal positions

2007-10-29T10:43:00.000+02:00

Surely the sum of our enlightened experience is that the only reasonable hope for us is in historical progress leading to a transformation, the nature of which we can hardly even begin to imagine. As we now are we will never escape: imprisoned by the cruel spectacles of history and nature and our own panicky animal instincts. A state all the more hateful because not all hateful: so many acts of human kindness, of integrity, of love, flicker in the darkness, brightly, briefly, perpetually surrounded by the eternal freezing cold that is our human stupidity, ignorance and fear. That instinct towards the better, those acts of love and integrity, we must set free thus fundamentally changing ourselves into something else and leaving (hopefully) all history and nature behind. This is the fundamental liberal position, surely. A refusal of both the narrowly shrewd, self-perpetuating conservative wallowing in the wretchedness that is humankind and the blind radical insistence that this wretchedness is not integral to us and easy and simple to abolish. This is what our serious human inquiry has established, and on this bleak position any hopes for future must be based.

In defence of George Eliot

2007-10-12T21:57:00.000+03:00

In the course of the assorted tragedies and collapses of the 20th century we surely have lost an essential tone of doubt, inquiry and worry that was simultaneously perpetually, and rationally, uncertain of its own significance but still crucially confident of its internal coherance. It was an unflinching but humane gaze on mankind and our messy and bloody history of ignorance and aggression - nevertheless combined with a firm belief on the possibility of progress. Now instead we have the forever shifting language of the largely - and self-confessedly - irrelevant and self-doubting, self fleeing postmodern tradition accompanied with the most destructive and amoral materialism that it refuses to confront in its all pervasive relativism. Surely this is an overreaction to these not any more so recent shocks? History, quite apart from its modern guises, has in any case been one slow holocaust - and will perpetually continue to be so by the weight of its own logic and motored by our blind, panicky, animal passions. The only exception, thus far, has been our brief enlightened, though largely failed, quest and hope for human understanding and progress. Just one pitiful, first attempt in all this time - and one reaching so far even in the deepest failure. There surely is ample time yet for change for the better, for developement, for reasoned self-control - for further attempts. And what is the alternative: should we never attempt more than what unspeakably little we have, and are? Who can set a meaningful limit for human growth, for serious human inquiry?

On not being an island

2007-09-25T20:08:00.000+03:00

Now with a new member in the family I have noticed an excess of Donnean feelings: a sunny, vulnerable little boy has made the harshness of the world very concrete. Yes, with any luck we’ll be able to protect his way till the time he’ll start choosing it for himself (hopefully doing it also under lucky stars). But I know, we all do, that this is not the case for countless of families, for countless of children: today, tomorrow, every day random tragedies strike from blue or stormy skies. Every day we offer ourselves, our loved ones for this reversed lottery. The callousness we need for living is largely devoted to ignoring this reality. More horror than boredom in this world certainly.

Not that I would think that we are entitled to any perfect sorrow, or perfect joy here: we are, will perpetually remain, incomplete and hesitant beings, unsure of meanings, impermanent, quickly fading. But as much as we have permanence and promise it's connected with love, with giving, with this offering of hostages, however reluctantly, to the fate - with this decision to live with reckless abandon. When I survey the remains of my once proud ramparts that were so impenetrable and intricate, I now notice gaping holes: walls have been throughly razed down, no resistance will be possible here. That truly is a measure of success, but it comes at a high price, as everything valuable does.

So many of the ways of the world are designed to hide, to ignore and to protect us from this realization of how much we have gambled - or how much, out of base fear, we have not dared to gamble and grasped something graspable instead. Of course in place of any serious tones on this subject of living we have endless entertainment, corrupt, ignoble politics and sheer physical and mental tiredness: this society has its way chosen for itself and it will not be a conscious path towards increased awareness. And perhaps that is for the better, humankind cannot bear very much reality. If we could we would be something else, be somewhere else, in a different situation - but one wonders whether it would really be an easier situation... Still, my own preference would be for a far more austere, more serious disposition in this world of love and loss.

On the suicide of Alan Turing

2007-09-12T09:16:00.000+03:00

I never cease to be amazed at how stupid our organizations are and how stupid, unimaginative and ignorant are the people in charge of them. Perhaps it is a failing to be surprised by this: it is the way of the world. Any philosophy will be used as an excuse for power - that may be their most fundamental use - and stupidity will forever congregate around power and its institutions. This is how it goes, how it has always gone. Perhaps our tragedy is that we can always see amazingly far beyond our painfully narrow scopes of action but we will always remain powerless to free ourselves from them. So, the stupidity is only a half of the story, the other half is that it couldn't be otherwise: we remain poised, wise enough to see the cruel limits but incapable of ever breaking them down. Not without a transformation that would change us into something almost unrecognizable. That transformation will surely remain the dream, but hardly a goal of practical action. Not in any foreseeable future.

Marie, Marie hold on tight

2007-09-03T16:06:00.000+03:00

Reading Ackroyd's biography I have been quite struck how odd a person T.S.Eliot really was. In many ways his beliefs and personality were actually much crazier than those of Yeats, and that is much said. He was forced to construct an iron cage of a philosophy, however absurd, literally to survive as a poet, as a person. One sees disintegration and chaos following on his footsteps, and a panicked flight away from them. Touch and go it was on the way, a desperate survival game but one that yielded such majestic, such odd poetry. Strange music. Now it is easy to see the response to the Waste Land as a significant historical phenomenon itself, so much of it surely unintended and unforeseen by the author: that badly shaken, wounded era demanded an artistic expression and would have gotten one in any case but Eliot's disjointed, apocalyptic language was uniquely suited those circumstances. In many ways violence was done to his art in the process, but I don't think that either, the poetry or its effect, diminish from the misunderstanding. Perhaps the opposite. Such a century to have.

Decline and fall

2007-08-28T21:04:00.000+03:00

I have lately been wondering whether I should stop following US politics altogether. This largely for the same reason as I don't any more much follow contemporary Russian politics: the truth will not emerge, or change anything, just causes will not be rewarded and the whole political discourse is absurdly skewed and unreal, vile things are said, celebrated and rewarded. Where is now the American Revolution with its enlightenment values, where is the proud and selfconfident Republic that once took seriously the idea that there are inalienable rights and an absolute equality before the law?

I am not saying that those principles were ever perfectly implemented but they were taken seriously and there was a sincere, widespread faith in progress and rational political discourse. Now we have a staggering 30% of the electorate obsessively, even voluntarily divorced from the empirical reality. We have amazing concentrations of wealth that cannot but corrupt the political process. We have an alliance of primitive fundamentalist religion and cynical corporate elites that has created a very permanent seeming corrupt populist logic to the political process. Yes, there might be a polite, housetrained Democrat elected to the presidency in 2008, the majorities of polite, housetrained Democrats in the Congress might increase. There might be some temporary, marginal tinkering of the system before the orchestrated media onslaught and the unavoidable burdens of office will create a new, hysterical and irrational backlash.

We would desperately need a fundamental shift of the political constellation everywhere in the West but it is very hard to see any such transformation happening with the current distribution of power. There is an irrational and atavistic lock on political power that seems in many ways organic and natural concequence of the structures of the modern Western society. I'm no longer that sure that the system works anywhere: the wheels are slowing down and once coherent political traditions are gradually disintegrating into corruption and meaninglessness. History has always followed power and the highest form of power are increasingly in the stupendous concentrations of capital that we now have in the modern world economy. Once capitalism was best protected by a (limited) selection of enlightenment values and protestant Christianity but now it does quite well with just the entertainment industry combined with the increasing demands of "work place efficiency" and painkilling doses of primitive religion purged of any genuine thought.

I really wonder what permanent improvement any progressive movement can accomplish in these hostile circumstances (certainly at their most hostile and most powerful in the USA but in existence everywhere in the West). The deep currents of social and economic change seem mostly to be against any serious reform and return to enlightenment values and to the discourse of progess and reason. Perhaps this is a too pessimistic and in any case unhelpful, impractical contribution. Still, I would think that the modern left is quite in need of the broad perspectives and coherent, holistic approaches to the political process. These chaotic skirmishes and daily battles with the irrational and atavistic opponents are invaluable, a civilizational defence indeed, but on this ground, with this balance of forces, can they be anything more than holding actions? Inch by inch we seem to lose real ground even when having scattered local successes and apparent reversals of fortune. Can we turn the tide?

(A cross post from DK.)