The last of Europe's stone age race

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 progressing populations. 

Wandering ever 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 and not altogether pleasant conclusions rising from this rather odd heritage. But surely it is not a bad thing to have a memory?

The limits of art

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

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

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

Now with the waning of American influence and the rise of China and India 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 soldiers. Now could we imagine the same situation in East Berlin, what kind of greeting would a Soviet battle group have gotten? With a wall built to stop the selfsame people from escaping the tyranny?

It is hard for me then 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 the fronts during the WW2, it was the only thing capable of keeping the West safe from genuinely mad terror states - despite of all the accompanying decadence and moral corruption. That was one mighty swift sword of the Republic.

The difference is that then those destructive forces were being kept in check by the citizens, however imperfectly. 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

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

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?

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

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

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

There can't be many as uplifting and as 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, only too 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, Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Methodists, forming in later generations such an aristocracy of intelligence and culture, opposed fanatically by their unchanged once brethren, the absolute 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

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 whatever 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

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 ice cold.

Oh, what a literary century

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

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.