On My Protracted Absence

Hello my dear and loyal (despite what Blogger statistics may say) readers.  I thought I would take a moment to write a (for once, actually) short post to explain myself.  Namely, I have not been writing this past week, due to a lengthy research trip in Bavaria.  I'll be back in fair Albion next week, at which point you can expect a return to the normal writing cadence.

'Till then!

On Giving The Ever Loving Hell In

(Fair warning:  This post, words and links, contains topically appropriate use of profanity.  I normally do not like to use this sort of language, but it is highly relevant to the topic, and dilutions like 'the b-word' are profoundly annoying.)

I have given this post a title that is a phrase as obtuse in its construction as the kluge of a topic on which I am presently set to writing.   There are two facets to today’s post, one of which grew out of the other.

 I very strongly considered titling the post “On giving the ever loving fuck in.”  There were two reasons – one was the magnitude of the revulsion I felt for the idea at hand (which I will discuss below), and the other was that I had been thinking a bit lately on the subject of profanity, its use, and its usefulness.

Source:  Oh, let's say that I scanned a cd cover...

I have a complex relationship with salty language.  On the one, boring, priggish hand, there is something unbecoming about swearing like a goddam sailor all the fucking time.  Ahem.  It smacks ungentlemanly and my admitted pretensions to propriety often preempt a good profane rant.  I am decidedly old-fashioned, and the popular understanding of “old-fashioned-ness” is very much tied up in a stereotypical grandmotherliness, or at least in oafish avuncularity.  Now, the rakish antique that is my idealisation of the anachronistic is far from avuncular, but one must keep up appearances.  The public wants pseudovictorian umbrage at profanity from its paragons of propriety, whether or not it is historically accurate.

On the other hand, bugger that.  Never in history has it been more universally improper to holler obscenities in public than it is now.   The modern eyes (and more appropriately, ears) hear words like ‘humbug,’ ‘bunkum,’ ‘poppycock,’ ‘balderdash,’ and ‘pants,’ and find them quaint and adorable.  And it is true:  in the modern day, these words are that to which we seem to turn when we are trying to avoid using one of the big 7… or 10?  That being the case, most assume that in their day, these words served this same function – inoffensive nonsense words that well dressed, moustachioed men employed to keep the fouler stuff out of the discussion and ensure no be-laced ladies fainted with an astonished ‘Well, I never!’ The reality, of course, is that these words were every bit profane in their heyday; they were salty language that men might use amongst themselves or in personal conversations, but were as proscribed from speeches or polite conversation as the worst of today’s popular music vocabulary obscenities.  (Sorry for that link.  This one is far better.)

The great trouble with profanity as a category is that in proscribing certain utterances as impolite and uncouth, we remove from our general usage what are perhaps our most expressive and powerful words.  And yet, and this is the real trouble, that power can only exist thanks to the proscription.  It is not a difficult gedankenexperiment – if the word ‘Wednesday’ were generally held to be the absolute height of filth in auditory form, prone to screeching children and fainting matrons, then exclaiming that you are absolutely Wednesday mad about something would have a certain thrust to it that other strong, but polite, words would not.  (The same goes for ‘Belgium.’)  Similarly, if ‘twat’ were the third month of the year, then, well, we would all just have to get used to dropping that profoundly ugly word in polite conversation (its transcendent awfulness aside).  It is because the words are shocking that they are effective – but this is old hat. 

The good stuff, as usual, is neurological.  As it so happens, when we monitor the brain of a garden variety human whilst they hear two sets of words – the perfectly polite, and those considered profane in that person’s community and era – the brain treats the two categories differently.  While the normal, polite language is processed through the language centres and parsed for semantics, syntax, context, and meaning, the profanity has the added bonus of eliciting response in the amygdalae – centres of emotion processing.  In a wonderful confluence of our biology and society, once a word has been deemed ‘over-powerful’ by society at large, our brain has the decency to reroute it as a direct expression of strong emotions.  Profanity can even mediate pain.  Convenient indeed, and all the more reason to swear like a sailor – provided that you mean it;  nothing ruins a good, strong effect like normalisation.  So it seems William F. Buckley had it right: if a word is considered by the general audience to be something of a strong sentence enhancer, then neurology suggests that you can convey your strong point best with a bit of goddam profanity.

(I have dispensed with discussing slurs in the above protraction.  As a white male, it is difficult for me to discuss the appropriateness of racial/ethnic/other slurs, as the punishment for having an opinion in this area usually involves being dragged behind a horse made of tweets for a week or so.  That said, I do not consider most slurs truly profane, as most of them have no objective meaning with respect to the individual.  ‘Bitch,’ for example, is a profanity – it comes with certain negative qualities that one presumes you assign to whomever you assign the label.  Most slurs, on the other hand, do not do this; ‘cracker,’ often applied to whites, may come with some racial stereotypes, but calling a honkey a cracker doesn’t attach to that howlie any particular set of personal attributes – it just makes you a jackass.)

So all this leaves the question, what is it in to which I am giving with such dramatic exasperation as to be tempted to litter my blog titles with profanity?   Stop delaying and get on with it, you say.  Fine, but I don’t like it and I’m not happy to say it…  I have much derided the balkanisation of modern society into ever shrinking empires of the individual; millions upon millions turning inward to self-aggrandisement and self-promotion.  I am certainly not innocent in this regard; you are reading a blog that I write for no reason! (ambiguous antecedent deliberate).  In light of this, it is very unpleasant for me to admit that I have bitten another e-bullet and decided to wallow a bit deeper in the mud.

Ok enough circumlocution.

I’ve gotten a goddam Twitter account.

[Shudders].

Several people have been trying to convince me to tweet for a while (many of them the same set that convinced me that this blog might be worth writing).  I have resisted valiantly until now, but with the creation of the blog, their arguments became more convincing – if one is going to be a prostitute one ought to be a well-supplied prostitute.

So I will be occasionally tweeting to announce new posts here and to share my thoughts, banal or otherwise, too short to necessitate a full blog post.  I do suspect that the 140 character limit may inhibit me a bit; as my own twitter ‘handle’ attests – my writing is usually @FarTooFlorid.  This crampedness of expression was one of my strongest arguments against Twitter, but oh well, here’s to giving the ever loving hell in.

I apologise for the hanging preposition in the title and in the previous sentence.  It will haunt me forever, but “On giving in the ever loving hell” sounds stupid. 

A good evening to you all.

On Pernicious Adequacy

In a fitting follow on to my rare paean to the post-Great War – aka ‘modern’ – world that was my previous and first post, I thought it appropriate to speak (mercifully, more briefly*) on a now slowly wilting societal and personal value of tremendous import that in fact had its apotheosis in that very modern era – ambition. 

Ambition Incarnate

Source: No clue, but I'm guessing public domain, previously British government

What I mean by this is an ambition to excellence, and to the bettering of oneself, one’s standing, and one’s standards.  Though, as said, its apotheosis is distinctly modern, it is not unique to the post-WWI era upon which I hang that label.  But before I delve too deep there, let’s tell the full story, shall we?

Eurocentric history, for all its flaws, allows us to arrange the years since the Fall of Rome (which for tradition’s sake I will establish at 476, though the cultural impact of Rome was such that one can convincingly argue against its very demise), as one march of increasing quality of life and increasing freedom and possibility for the majority of Europe’s (and later, North America’s) denizens.  From tribalism to feudalism to monarchism to representative government to the fiddly multicultural demagoguery democracy of modern Europe and the EU, the rights and privileges of the average man steadily, on balance, improved (yes man, I take it squarely on the chin that women’s prospects were far less than men’s – though the idea that these have largely improved with time is not, I think, a terribly controversial one).  Yet for all of these political and philosophical advancements, the chances of rising above the station of one’s birth to greater wealth and personal influence remained far more static; indeed the ability to pull oneself up by bootstraps, as the phrase goes, came not with political development, but with paradigmatic shift in economics.  The industrial revolution was the key. 

I am under no delusions that the first job opportunities that industrialisation presented to the masses of working poor were terribly life changing or tolerable.  Early factory work was undeniably awful, the more so for its lack of safety measures and the poor treatment of child labourers especially.  Yet it was first in the late Victorian era and the opening decades of the 1900s that the idea blossomed that any man, though unlikely, could through his own work and effort make himself into a financial success, and an important member of society.   It is telling that Dickens’ work on the very idea of improving one’s station, Great Expectations, takes for granted that the means to one’s improvement will come not from oneself, but from a visiting purveyor of happy happenstance; benevolence from above.  Indeed, in the titular scene, Pip’s benefaction is indicated to him by Mr. Jagger simply by telling him that he now has “great expectations;” no un-endowed labourer having any expectations that one would call great.  Yet by the time Victoria Regina had passed, nabobs out of the middle class had risen and fallen, and two great wars had been fought, nearly every man on either side of the North Atlantic believed to at least some extent that his stars where as mobile as those that had hung above his crib.  Witness not the American Dream of a house, spouse, dog and some humorously fractional number of offspring, but rather the American dream of becoming one’s own Carnegie, Vanderbilt, or Rockefeller.  By the time the dust of WWII had begun to clear, nearly 2000 years of progress left each Western man with the right to ambition, and a streak to rise above adequacy.

But ambition is a fragile gift, and adequacy a pernicious slime.  It is, in a way, understandable; WWI (to bludgeon a dead, dead, dead horse) and WWII (to bomb one) had destroyed two generations worth of the sort of daring, brash young men from whom ambition exudes.  Europe especially was tired, battered, shorthanded, and aghast; any change could sell, and the simple adequacies of a safe roof, non-rationed food, and peace in one’s time were elating after those earthly eschatons.  And so Europe, for which Britain will be our microcosm, began its perilous dance with adequacy.  Perhaps the brightest, most stinging example of this pernicious love affair came in 1971, when British peacetime income tax was set with a top bracket of 98%, when investment was included, for yearly incomes over £20,000 (about £175,000, or $290,000, in the modern day).  True, this is quite a lot of money, and more than most people will ever make – but it is the strongest evidence of the culture of adequacy one could encounter.  Only in a society in which each taxpayer unquestionably expected and, worse, accepted that he or she could never come to earn such money can such a policy endure the public scrutiny.  To this day, for all of my love for it, the United Kingdom suffers from a pernicious adequacy, its inborn class divisions – deeper admittedly than those across the Atlantic – worn as an excuse for settling.  The nabobs might laugh, but more likely they would weep.

The United States was not so battered by the Great Wars and so did not so dramatically succumb to the taxation manifestation of adequacy, and Americans tend to see these British taxation numbers and recoil.  To its credit, the citizens of the USA have held tighter to their ambition than their British counterparts, but they too are not without their creeping adequacy.  It has become stylish amongst American malcontents to discuss the ‘lie’ of the American Dream – in such discussion most certainly restricted simply to the promise of an owned home, spouse, kids, pet– as an adult fairytale peddled by the powerful to persuade the plebe populace to persist in their perseverations under the heel of big banks and business.  Pundit and progressive politician tell us that more government aid and more programs are necessary as more and more the greed of the haves condemn the yet-to-haves never to have.  And the public believes it.  A steady job and a home for one’s family with bit of liquidity for leisure and little luxuries have now been labeled the apex of ambition where for a gleaming century in history they were the desirous adequate!  For about a hundred years we had so raised the hopes of man that a lifetime of working drudgery meant more than a hovel and the chance at meat once a week at the largesse of one’s owners.  Yet now, faced with the difficulty, the inconvenience, the uncertainty of the fruits of striving, more and more people slip into the same pernicious adequacy – 'where I am is enough, I should be happy with what I have, the world is too mean a place for me to do great things.'

There is nothing wrong with the 'Little' American Dream – a well appointed home, a happy family, and a brace of disposable income is as fine a goal as mankind ever had, and I speak not only to money, but to great thoughts and deeds - goals which do not necessarily need a bankroll.  Something as simple as excellence in one's own field, and the drive to achieve it, is enough.  But to hear the naysayers call it an unattainable ambition is a farce against the ambition that drove the great men of the last century, and an abnegation of the responsibility to greatness that must draw on at least some.  What’s more, it reduces adequacy to the squalor of the past – a truly anti-progressive attainment.  When a people have abnegated wholesale their call to greatness and the drive to achieve, their chances at greatness die, and themselves soon after with little cultural legacy of which to speak.  Never were a greater lie told nor pariah released upon us, and it preys on all people now: “Cast down your bucket where you are.”

My best to all on this fine winter evening.  Chase the sun.

(*a lie, sorry)

On the Making of Modernity

I decided, with the coming of the New Year, 2014, that it was time to start this blog.  I took its name from an incisive quote by the mensch of all wordsmiths, Rudyard Kipling: “He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.” It should surprise no one that such quotable a poet would offer such eloquent snark rebuffing the practice of quoting others, and the irony sticks well to my writing here – as I enjoy the words and works of Kipling, so too do I enjoy the expressiveness and profundity that may come from the well placed quotation of my betters who afore me writ.  So, in the purple of emperors, Kipling-affirmed or not, I will here wax poetic and splenetic as I like, quoting away, and certainly quoting Kipling enough to trouble his grave’s sleep, if not to send him fully spinning.

The thought of committing my ambient musings to writing and airing them for the world’s judgment has been with me for some time, but something about the crowning of my last year of course-based education (now a research-only student 'till DPhil do I part studentship) left me feeling as though it were time to begin, if only because my educative endeavour no longer impresses upon me to write on myriad subjects (RIP breadth requirements).  My subject, zoology, permits me to be more florid and effusive than say, molecular biology, but nonetheless, all science has a tendency to constrain the writer to word counts and convention, to speak nothing of the transcendent rarity of Kipling quote opportunities.  So here I stand, or write, as it were.

I had considered naming this blog “The Gripe and Grouse” or some petulant similar alliteration on the grounds that its likely content will be dominated by my less than satisfied dissection of the mores and maladies of modernity.  Though the name ended on a different gybe, it is safe to say that the topics will remain in such curmudgeonly territory.   With that being the case, my mind turned to an approaching anniversary of what may be the most important event in ushering our world and our human experience form ‘history’ into ‘modernity’ - one of my very favourite topics – World War I.

British Temporary Military Cemetery, public domain image

The Great War – so great that they threw an encore by popular demand but a generation later – has always fascinated me far more than its much more popular, younger sibling.  Well, no, it hasn’t, because, product of the American school system I, World War II was the one of which I had far more information and grasp when my time in state mandated education ended.  Modern Americans generally enjoy World War II history – grand, unambiguous, valiant, and certainly impressive – it did such a good job of being the ideal war we always wanted that our archetype of conflict now centres itself on its otherwise unique model.  If every war since had been cut of the cloth of World War II, I very much doubt the Vietnam protests would have held much traction.  Yet precisely because of this, World War II came to bore me.  Take out the great speeches of Churchill and the handful of heartwarming and/or badass stories (all credit to them) and discussion of World War II in philosophical and moral terms yields dilemmata about as stimulating as a freshman ethics course.  Quite simply: evil rose up under good’s nose, good caught on, and defeated evil with tactics that made good feel uneasy at times but were probably justified.  This is gross simplification, and I am sure I will delve further and more complexly into the miasma of the Second Great War later, but a surface analysis (I’m not writing a book here, after all) leaves me with much less fat to chew than World War I.

In the young throws of high school when one first learns of the details of the Great War, the childish mind sees the tragedy in a vast war conceived of a single assassination, but can almost justify the reaction in its naiveté – of course the Austrians had to go to war , someone killed their archduke; of course.  Of course the rest of Europe got involved, you have to honour your treaties!  To the bright, yet to become jaded mind, the world still works like Age of Empires II – alliances are to be honoured or else!  But of course, adult cynicism – born, some say, of WWI itself – knows better, and knows that in matters of war (and love, so goes the adage), betrayal is the rule to the exception that is stalwart commitment (reference: Britain and the CSA, Germany and Russia in WWII, Italy in WWI – the list goes on).  In this regard, the circumstances surrounding the explosion of WWI can, in an almost delightfully perverse way, warm the heart as a miracle of constancy in alliances.  Though this can only be truly argued tongue firmly in cheek, it highlights the contrast that initially drew me away from WWII buffery to WWI – WWII found its heartwarming moments in victory and triumph of human decency over evil; blasé at best, if still one of the only movies that can make me tear up.  WWI pairs the valient optimism of the human spirit and tales of the benevolence thereof with utter futility and desperation, all in a sea of pointlessness – much more compelling, to my mind, and much more interesting as a study of human conflict.

The Great War carries many a romantic moniker (as if “The Great War” weren’t sufficient) – the war to end all wars, the first total war, the last gentlemen’s war, the first modern war – and comes with a lot of beautiful but inexpressive catch-all analyses – something along the lines of ‘the outcome of a dramatic increase in technology outpacing improvement of tactics’ being the most popular.  While all of these are true, the human touch of the implications of these realities is often missed under the smug blanket statements – a forgivable shortcoming in light of the profound anonymity of human suffering in a war that produced nearly 60,000 casualties in a single army on a single day of groundfighting.  It is often pointed out that, at least on the Western Front, in the first third to half of the war (before gas attacks stuck in the moral craw of the respective sides) the two sides managed to nurse an unexpectedly ample empathy for their enemy; all other unfortunate racial implications aside, the Germans and the British saw each other as civilised western men fighting to keep their promises and honour, fighting war as a business and a game, fighting like hell when told to do so, and likely looking forward to sitting down for a drink and a grouse with their surviving cousins on the other side once the higher ups were satisfied and everyone was paid and discharged; or at least so the more honeyed mythos would have us believe.  Though this arrangement broke down as the war dragged on and less ‘gentlemanly’ tactics came to prominence, the early years of the war – with their Christmastruces and live and let live ideals – offer perhaps humanity’s last look into war before mechanisation of attacking tactics, before widespread cynicism, and before modernity.

Those who know me well know that I am no enthusiast of modernism, and that I am a wary watcher of modernity.  Yet for all my preference of anachronism, when it comes to the horror of war I am damned pleased to live in the dissipated present that any time in the glorious, romantic past.  This is largely due to the greater societal outcomes of WWI.  The utter destruction of the best, brightest, and bravest of an entire generation of humans in the historical epicentre of the time (Europe, not to be Eurocentric, but this being the simple reality) for a war so very unnecessary and pointless in the clear, cool vision of hindsight birthed a new stratum of cynicism and aloofness to human endeavour and purpose.  And yet, in the hundred years that have elapsed since the beginning of the war that demonstrated for the world to see that whole swaths of promising humanity could be snuffed for next to nothing, war deaths have plummeted, and the humanity of every soldier and civilian lost in conflict – the attention to their stories, to their losses, to their struggles, has grown immeasurably.  When America fought its revolution, the tactics used by the British (and American army, at first) seem to the modern observer silly and wasteful of life – but were the suitable tactics at the time, and weighed the value of soldiers’ lives and health at parity with the function of the low accuracy cannon fodder that they were.  Indeed, from time immemorial until WWI, war was entered on the expected and accepted reality that where X men enter to carry out the violence for which they were contracted, Y men would die or be injured as the cost of doing such business.  Though significant chance of death or catastrophic injury in war remained accepted and expected through WWII, Korea, Vietnam and so on, the realities revealed in WWI and its trench warfare and "going-over-the-top" death sentence – that X could be so high, and Y so near to X – slowly turned the hearts and minds of society to the point where now, at least in the West, every death in war is a singular and personal tragedy – for the public as much as the family and friends – where dying in battle seems the highly unlikely bad lottery draw of military service rather than a fully anticipatable outcome.  The great irony is that the war that demonstrated the minuteness of one human’s death in modern battle set in motion the modernisation of war and of its perception to the point where we now value each human life more.  WWII has long worn the label, but for perhaps this one reason, we can, in the long view, finally call WWI a “good war.”

Cynicism, irony, dissatisfaction, pointlessness – these are the idols of the vapid, dissipated aspects of modernity that I so rue; the unfortunate modern mores that I can only imagine this venue will see me railing against all too often, or at least deconstructing.  Yet if the crucible of their foundation, the Great War set in motion 100 years ago this June 28th, in engendering these seeds of modernity, also made it infinitely more difficult and more personal for humans to look into the eyes of our fellow men and kill them dead in the course of routine, then perhaps even I can admit that the unfortunate mores are worth the human empathy.  With that I will close what will likely be my longest post here, and present before the weighing world, my blog.