G as in Good H as in Happy

"The body of law has had but a single life."

May 7, 2006

Albion's Seedlings links to an article on the American Colonies and Sir Edward Coke's British Jurisprudence, in a long post on the transmogrification of British law in America. The article focuses on

the legal underpinnings of the colonial, pre-revolutionary world. I think it is the best thing I have seen yet on how the common law actually made the transition from Britain to the USA.

Clio the Muse

The fine Regions of Mind salutes the Cliopatra award winners.

Frog in a Well was called the Best Group Blog, and the exceptionally cool calligraphy is copyrighted by Joseph Y Lo.

Esse est Percipi, or, What Good is an Unread Blog?

"Descartes shut the self in its inner prison," he writes, "and Fichte made the place so comfortable that the self decided to stay there." -- Roger Scruton

The Conservative Philosopher is off and running, temporarily unencumbered by permalinks. The posts so far are interesting, though Keith Burgess-Jackson is visibly disappointed at the bad manners and irrelevant tangents indulged by too many who comment, and their over-personal rhetoric.

Think arguments and analyses, not people. If an argument is bad, it cannot be made good by being made by a good person. If an argument is good, it cannot be made bad by being made by a bad person.

More Scruton thoughts for bloggers (though S. probably abhors so inelegant a term):

Self-expression is fine if you've got an interesting self to express. But what makes a self interesting is precisely that it's gone through a rigorous process of discipline and order and self-understanding of a kind that, for instance, Milton went through. Self-expression that hasn't done that is just embarrassing.

He endorses our Good&Happy mini-hippocratic oath.  First, sow no misery...

But I do believe that when other people are concerned, one is under an obligation not to impose one's anxieties and glooms upon them, but to fortify them in the difficult business of living.

Things good to think about.

The long post by Daniel Bonevac, Conservatives on Innovation (2.1.05), interprets the pesky standards of those cold-hearted mossback hypocritical obstructionist 'compassionate conservative' thing-ys.

For those of more technical philosophical bent, the blog resurrects the centuries-old controversies raised by Berkeley. George  Berkeley (1685-1753), Irish post-Platonic Anglican bishop (and benefactor of Harvard and Yale), concluded that ordinary physical objects are composed solely of ideas, which are inherently mental, and that thus objects derive their existence from being observed. The tree falling, unheard, in the forest paradox.

This witty parody is attributed to Msr. Ronald Knox:

There once was a man who said, ‘God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.’

A response purportedly from Bishop Berkeley's POV:

‘Dear Sir
Your astonishment’s odd:
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by,
Yours faithfully,
God.

Go along now, mingle, work the room, express yourselves, see and be seen.

Liveblogging the Conference, Sort of

January 21, 2005

With only an audio stream, the experience of the first day of the Harvard conference was a bit hallucinogenic.  The microphones picked up quilt-patches of status-establishing conversations here and there during the breaks, and there seemed to be a pretty equal distribution of grappling for territory and  conciliatory analysis. Moderators once or twice remonstrated about "civility."

The predictable context:

1. Mainstream press and much academia:  "Who are these people?  How can anyone without our training and experience and institutional protocols and editorial personnel determine what information is necessary for a democracy?  How can we be make sure the citizenry has to listen to us even if they disagree?" [our gloss];

and

2. Bloggers and out-of-the-contraption contingent: "All the journalism-school and newspaper-of-record verities are up for grabs.  The business models are fraying, the audience has keyboards, and no longer are willing to swallow it from the media spoon. They want to check it out for themselves. And respond, question, add to it. The model is no longer one-to-many, it is many-to-many, and the quality of the conversation will depend on the relationship, not the lineage of the institution. There is no choice to continue in the old way."

Tidbits:

There has been a power shift from producers to the "people formerly known as the audience;" this has led to a loss of soverignty--exclusive control--by the journalists.

Journalists have not tended so much to their connection to their audience and the world, as to pursuing quality information.

The public thinks media companies pursue money and journalists self-aggrandisement.

Lack of credibility is fueling the growth of blogs.

Who are these people who write all these [op-ed] columns?

The old metaphor [was] The New York Times front page as God's memo on the day.

We're in the unpredictable middle of things, like radio in the 20s. When money affects the blogosphere, it will change quickly.

The main difference is that on the net power is different.  The people you are speaking to have more power than you learned in journalism school, are suddenly empowered vis-a-vis [journalists].  A professional after 20 years in the profession has to rethink what they are doing--It's embarrassing.

Rathergate was not hostile to the media, it showed the power of the media.

Journalism was founded on the assumption that the audience lacks knowledge and information and "that's why they need us."  As it turns out, the audience has lots, journalism needs to tap it and deliver it back to them.

Every [blog] reader is a writer.  It is the opposite of the MSM regime.  The reader can talk back....Every reader is connected horizontally to the other readers....It isn't really accurate to say there's no editor.  Rather, the editing occurs after publication.  Readers are your editors.

If ethics in journalism is now about relationship,

1. What kinds of promises might parties to this relationship care most about? Talk about disclosure and transparency makes little promise about where the relationship is going.
2. If transparency is not enough, what else?
3. What’s the coolest tool we could create that would help us create trust and a better representation of reality? Are a technorati, wiki, the best ways of addressing this?

The coolest available tool to increase trust? Link to your sources. Links show a different attitude toward the reader, "See for yourselves, don’t take our word for it, check it out." Not just "Take it from us."

The first reporter who figures out a weblog is a great tool for drawing knowledge in and creates a reporters’ weblog about the gathering of knowledge, will make a name and influence journalism.  (S)he will demonstrate how powerful distributed intelligence is, and will break stories no one else does.

The question narrowly framed by the end of the first day was Is there something we can do collectively to help us arrive at better representation of reality?

Your un-certified, unedited un-press-credentialed correspondent, over and out.

Stay tuned for much shorter 2d-Day Report.

When.

Ever.

Update:  Jeff Jarvis, being there, knows who said what. And Jay Rosen's  PressThink report is now up, has the best morsel of agreement across a partisan divide between Powerline's Hinderaker and Dave Scripting News Winer: 

"We have deeper values that bind us."  The deeper values are: let's go around the bastards.

A don't tread on me that resonates at chez Dilys.

A Beneficent Peter Principle, or, No More Fear of Failure

November 23, 2004

Discovered through Bob Jacobsen:

IT Conversations audio stream of recent PopTech presentations.

• Bruce Mau's talk on his "clear manifesto for design in the service of practical social change" [as readers and listeners we must always satisfy ourselves about "clear" and "practical"];
  

• Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point and the new Blink, addressing that issue so recently prominent in political polling, that people's preferences are unstable, and that we ourselves do not know or express, or comfortably explain, what we truly want. In honest conversation, it is often wise to test answers, to be an advocate on behalf of what we know or sense of the person, against their first or easy impulse. Note: this is not the same as arguing, or setting them straight.

Update:  A reader writes that this is a key skill of effective personal coaches. How politics might change if the various players had at their elbows someone charged to see and to hear "the first or easy impulse" of the candidate and to test those impulses against what they "know or sense" may be truer for that person.

What kind of honestly-held principles, and genuinely-intended platforms, might be put forth by politicians then? Is there room for improvement?  What if the true feelings of the candidate were so well considered and "cooked" that s/he could be candid at every moment? If the actual plan, except for, say, classified intelligence data, could be communicated?

It could happen.

•  Paul Saffo, Institute for the Future, The Case of the Blind Venetians:
  

It is fashionable, but premature to write off the future of the US info tech sector. The dot.bomb collapse and offshoring are quite real, but hints of the path forward are hidden in the history of Silicon Valley and the tech sector. And the secret is this: innovation advances from failure to failure, not from success to success. The time has come to understand and embrace this hidden source of the US' technological dynamism, lest we end up like Venice in its last century, trapped by old habits and sinking beneath the sea that once sustained it's economic and innovation miracle.  

Of specialized interest for some of my marketing readers:  Christopher Ireland on Organizing Principles of Design Research.  More to follow after attending Wizard Academy 's IDEAlley on December 9, since our little Good&Happy shop is designing several products:  a series of idiosyncratic lifestyle books, and Continuing Education Events for Professionals that are premium designed experiences, not just another day in a musty conference hall. We preach Laying a Foundation By Thinking It Through.  Now we must do it. And plan for a most profitable & successful & satisfying failure, in the fashion of, shall we say, a gimlet-eyed mercantile Florentine.

Too much is not enough -- more Alexander McCall Smith

October 6, 2004

Not just one new series and not just two! The NYTimes reports that in December this delightful-book-generator-in-superhuman-volume will publish a novel that begins a series featuring "the pompous Prof. Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld of the Institute of Romance Philology in Regensburg, Germany, the author of Portuguese Irregular Verbs and a man consumed by jealousy and suspicion."

Perhaps upstream of a swell of interest in the virtues of virtue, appearing in such new iterations as the John Templeton Foundation's In Character and, in its own small tangential way, this weblog, the characters

embody Mr. McCall Smith's interest in everyday moral and philosophical conundrums. / "I'm quite intrigued by how modern philosophers who are engaging with the world answer the question of how we should live," he said. "In my books I'm increasingly going to look at that question: how people resolve ordinary dilemmas and moral issues in their day-to-day life."

A professor of medical law, and a member of the International Bioethics Commission of UNESCO, McCall Smith is not unfamiliar with the complexities and darknesses of modern life. However, his writing is not captive to those forces.

...Though he admires social realism in novels, he is not that sort of writer. / "If we take a hard-nosed look at the world, we could say, 'Well, it doesn't always work, and ultimately people will actually disappoint us,' " he said. "But the problem with that is that it isn't a particularly useful philosophy to get us through life. We can't necessarily answer the great questions about meaning - Camus talks about this, that you can't answer the question of what is the meaning of life, but you can find meaning in a limited context, and work toward that.'' / He continued, "There is a role for books that say to people that life is potentially amusing and that there are possibilities of goodness and kindness - that kindness needn't be dull, that it can also be elevating and moving."

Oh yes, the third treasure is a serial novel appearing every weekday in Edinburgh's own The Scotsman. The man wrote a book on Forensic Aspects of Sleep. Does he? Ever?

The nice and the good

September 28, 2004

Randall Jarrell was a deft American poet of deep unsentimental sentiment. (See what you think about The Woman at the Washington Zoo.) His novel, Pictures from An Institution, is superbly funny. I mention this because of a metaphor that appears early in the book. Describing the contortion of an amateur modern dancer, the protagonist is reminded of Greek philosophers having a nervous breakdown, muttering "Is it right to be good?"

Today, so soon after the Jewish High Holy Days, it made me happy to find (via Marginal Revolution) a positive answer to the question, "Is it good to be blessed?" Cecil E. Bohanon and T. Norman Van Cott, professors of economics as Ball State University, take on the manna that fell from heaven in the story of the Hebrews' 40-year wandering in the wilderness enroute to, well, to put it non-politically, a geographical location that they believed was their tribal destiny as well as their destination.

Bohanon and Van Cott argue that, in terms of the big picture, outsourcing means that

lower-cost production alternatives always expand consumption alternatives. Regardless of whether these alternatives trace to manna-like acts of God, new production technologies, foreigners willing to sell their products to us at less-than-prevailing prices, or even immigrants willing to work at less-than-prevailing wages, the result is the same. Consumption alternatives for the natives expand..... Fortunately for the Israelites, Moses didn’t order them to shun manna in order to preserve good jobs in food production.

An important question is how and at what level of magnitude to address the small-chunk problem of those workers who are displaced. The very strengths of a global market work against the tight tribal safety nets of simpler social organization. At the same time, shifts in intersecting market forces are the engine of much that is good.

In Kingsley Amis' novel Lucky Jim, the clear-sighted working-class hero declares that "Nice things are nicer than nasty things." Even mired as so many discussions are in ethical and aesthetic ambiguity, there are worse rules of thumb.

To begin at the level of semantic and perceptual reality:
More is more than less.

Good news from Alexander McCall Smith

September 27, 2004

Anyone else warmed and enchanted by the adventures of Mma Precious Ramotswe and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana can only rejoice at a book review in today's NYTimes. Alexander McCall Smith has launched another series, set in Edinburgh this time, with The Sunday Philosophy Club. To describe his books as "inviting readers into a world of kindness, gentility, and creature comforts" may not provide unambiguous illumination inasmuch as certain edgy postmodernists and over-educated snobs who prowl the fringe of Good&Happy held themselves for a long time aloof from investigating the popular series, leery of popular sentimentality.

Imagine then the salubrious shock of engaging an un-put-down-able paperback of The Kalahari Typing School for Men, when several of us here noticed tears spurting and laughter erupting in tandem, with a swiftness even Trollope had never effected, and for reasons we could not begin to explain.

Now McCall Smith's new heroine of a certain age, Isabel Dalhousie, articles editor for the Scottishly-apt apocryphal Review of Applied Ethics, sounds just the cup of leisurely, atmospheric, epicurean tea near a warm stone hearth. The accidental death of a beautiful youth,

leads Isabel to thoughts of Rupert Brooke and Byron, and to the kind of double negative that most philosophers like to avoid. Perhaps such a loss is sad "because we love the beautiful more; or because Death's momentary victory is all the greater," Isabel thinks. "Nobody, he says, smiling, is too beautiful not to be taken by me."

It is embarrassing to acknowledge that, on particularly frenetic days, out of the corner of my eye, I sometimes glimpse Hyacinth Bucket in the mirror. Perhaps the philosophical Isabel Dalhousie will offer a more beneficent role model. In more practical terms, her appearance on the scene guarantees books enough to last for years, if any local husbands are tempted to despair of finding easy no-fault gift ideas.