Reviews and News:
Tom Wolfe takes on Darwin in a baffling book: "Far from being a theory of everything, as Darwinians have claimed, says Wolfe, evolutionary theory most notably fails to apply to the most fundamental human skill: language. How on earth could language have evolved? Darwin's risible best guess was that we'd started off chirruping in imitation of birdsong. His failure to explain language bequeathed an aeon of medieval ignorance — that is Darwin's real legacy, according to Wolfe — a period longer than the Dark Ages in which the origin of human language was a non-topic, erased from intellectual history."
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A closer look at the Jewish copyright law: "Rabbis in Rome issued their first known ban on reprinting books in 1518. In some ways, the earliest bans mirrored the papal bans and secular book privileges then in vogue. (The book privileges allowed recipients a monopoly over the printing and publishing of a book for a designated period of time.) For example, both rabbinic and papal bans were often enforced through a decree of excommunication. That and other similarities reflect a shared understanding among early modern Jews and Gentiles of the nature of authorship. In fashioning their bans, however, the rabbis also drew heavily from traditional Jewish sources, such as the Torah, Talmud, and, eventually, halakhah. This influence is evident in the first ban's emphasis on Talmudic injunctions against encroaching on another's livelihood. (The secular book privileges, by way of contrast, emphasized the sovereign's discretion to reward deserving subjects.)"
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Edward Short reviews Auden's collected prose: "Since Auden only published two essay collections, The Dyer's Hand (1962) and Forewords and Afterwords (1973), there is much uncollected and unpublished work gathered here, and together with the previously published pieces, they reveal a good deal about the poet's inner life…Journalists will be amused by a long piece that Auden submitted to Life in 1966 on the fall of Rome, in which he observed certain startling parallels between the third and 20th centuries: 'Instead of Gnostics, we have Existentialists and God-is-dead theologians, instead of Neo-Platonists, devotees of Zen, instead of desert hermits, heroin addicts and Beats (who also, oddly enough, seem averse to washing), instead of mortification of the flesh, sado-masochistic pornography; as for our public entertainments, the fare offered by television is still a shade less brutal than that provided by the Amphitheatre, but only a shade and may not be so for long.' Edward Mendelson points out that Life was willing to pay the poet $10,000 for the piece, if only he toned it down. Auden refused, and was paid nothing."
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Revisiting the work of Italy's "likeable loser" poet: Giovanni Marrasio "was born somewhere between 1400 and 1405 in Noto, in southern Sicily, and in the course of a fast, active life (he died in 1452) he studied at Siena and then Florence before trying Ferrara under the rule of Leonello d'Este in the 1430s and 1440s. Marrasio had studied medicine, but his hope was always to attract a powerful patron for his art. He wrote poems (including startlingly good homages to the traditional Roman elegy), elaborate masques, and entreating tributes to the great and powerful – as well as scolding letters to old friends, basically asking them for tips about prospective paymasters."
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Former BBC head on Trump's "authenticism": The "authenticist prizes simplicity of language not because he values reason but because he associates simple expression with honesty of emotion and at least the appearance of being willing to engage with the lowliest members of a chosen community. Whereas the rationalist venerates the facts to the exclusion of almost everything else, the authenticist often finds them suspect, calling them factoids or statistics… to distinguish them from the bigger 'truths' he prefers to promote… what matters most is not argument, but story… If something feels true, then in some sense it must be true."
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John Self reviews Toby Vieira's "vivid and vigorous" Marlow's Landing.
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Diversity and chaos: "Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history. The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls, and myriad other African, Asian, and European communities spoke Latin, cherished habeas corpus, and saw being Roman as preferable to identifying with their own particular tribe. By the fifth century, diversity had won out but would soon prove a fatal liability."
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Italian 18-year-olds to receive €500 "culture bonus": "In a scheme that gets underway on September 15th, every Italian resident from the class of 1998 will be given a 'culture bonus', which they can use to buy books, concerts tickets, theatre tickets, cinema tickets, museum visits and even trips to the country's national parks. Some 575,000 teenagers will benefit from the scheme which will cost the Italian government €290 million."
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Essay of the Day:
What can José Ortega y Gasset teach Europeans today? Daniel Johnson considers:
"The key to 20th century European thought, as Ortega conceived it in his Mission of the University, is that the Church has abandoned the present, while the democratic state has submitted to public opinion. This left the press as the sole surviving spiritual force. While admitting that 'I may be nothing more than a journalist myself', Ortega wanted the university to 'assert itself as a major 'spiritual power', higher than the press, standing for serenity in the midst of frenzy, for seriousness and the grasp of the intellect in the face of frivolity and unashamed stupidity'. Today, not much remains of the higher journalism that in Ortega's day was represented by such titans as Karl Kraus in Vienna, Raymond Aron in Paris or George Orwell in London. And it must be admitted that, with a few exceptions, European universities have not fulfilled Ortega's hopes. Instead of preserving our culture, which Matthew Arnold defined as 'the best of what has been thought and said', our universities have denied that such values even exist. The failure of the university to preserve our culture has been paralleled in the failure of our artists to renew it. Their abdication of responsibility began with what Ortega described as 'the dehumanisation of art'. Six decades after Ortega's death, our culture has yet to rediscover the genius to transcend our mortality that we treasure in Shakespeare and Cervantes, Goethe and Goya, in the deep, pure wellsprings of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
"This absence of creative energy in European culture applies, unfortunately, to political thought too, including conservative thought. In Britain, we have produced a great conservative thinker in the late Michael Oakeshott, whose political philosophy, like that of his Spanish contemporary, attaches great importance to the idea of universitas. But Oakeshott sees this medieval concept as the origin of 'rationalism in politics': the idea of the state as an 'enterprise association', in which society is united by a 'common good' or collective purpose, as opposed to the state understood as a 'civil association', in which autonomous individuals pursue their own individual ends. The idea of an enterprise association is almost infinitely extendable: it can apply not only to a state, but to a union of states, a 'superstate'. The European Union is an archetypal case of an enterprise association. It exists for one purpose: 'ever closer union'. Its institutions, its laws, its treaties are all subordinated to and subsumed under this purpose. With uncharacteristic frankness, the former President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, describes the EU as 'a non-imperial empire'. As Oakeshott says in On Human Conduct, 'The member of such a state enjoys the composure of the conscript assured of his dinner. His 'freedom' is warm, compensated servility.'
"Yet there is another idea of Europe, one that Oakeshott briefly discusses in his essay on 'Europe, the emergence of an idea'. He points out that, unlike 'Asian' and 'African', ''European' has become an adjective which refers to something which may be found in any part of the world'. 'Europe' in this sense means much the same as 'the West'. And it is in this sense that Ortega was a true 'European'. Western civilisation has become ubiquitous because it opens up an infinite vista of possibility and potentiality to all those who grasp it. I mentioned earlier the idea of 'curiosity' as characteristic of this European or Western view of the world. There is another passage about curiosity in one of Ortega's most charming books, On Love, where he is discussing 'the psychology of the interesting man' — that is, the man with whom women fall in love. While he insists that he does not wish to 'intellectualise' love, he argues that love always has a rational core that derives from a particular kind of curiosity. 'This curiosity, which is simultaneously an eagerness for life, can only be found in porous souls where free air — cosmic air charged with stardust — circulates, unconfined by any limiting wall. But,' he goes on, 'curiosity is not enough to make us 'see' the delicate, complex structure of a person. Curiosity predisposes the eye, but the vision must be discerning. And such discernment is indeed the prime talent and extraordinary endowment which acts as a component in love.' The love of which Ortega speaks here is of course erotic love, but his words apply no less to patriotic love, to the love of country and the love of liberty.
"I hold up Ortega as a role model for young Spaniards because he seems to me to represent a kind of European intellectual who has almost disappeared, or at least been eclipsed, in the six decades since his death. That period roughly coincides with my own lifetime; and like others, I have often regretted the absence of the great thinkers, writers and artists who were my contemporaries but who have died before I could meet and learn from them. Hitherto, Ortega the European intellectual has had no real successor in Spain and precious few in Europe. Why not? And what is to be done about it?"
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Image of the Day: Jungfrau
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Poem: J. D. Smith, "Eulogy, First Draft"
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