What's he waiting for?

We were waiting for Mun-sup and Jae.

It was just outside the Hongdik University stop on line 2.

Who came first -- morality or politics?

Glen Newey wonders (LRB 9 July 2009) "why anyone should think that morality is a given, while politics remains to be constructed. . . . The idea seems to be that morality is grander than politics, because it is more amenable to reason, for example, or has a longer use-by date; so the thing to do is to put politics on a firm moral footing. . . . One could just as well argue the opposite. Or that politics is just the same raree-show of cruelty, boredom, hope, obliquity, and stupidity as any situation where human beings act together."

If you accept "morals are forever, politics is just one dame thing after another" there are three key political questions, according to Raymond Geuss:

1. "Who whom?" apparently from Lenin
2. "What is the thing to do here and now?"
3. How do politicians legitimize their actions and decisions?

Flipping the "how can god allow evil" on its head, Newey sees politics as more hopeful than morality: "In the old days theologians had the task of explaining how god could permit evil to happen, to which the least bad answer was that he had to lump it, as the price of human freedom. No human agency, including the state, can do a remotely plausible impersonation of the almighty. By keeping that in mind, we might even come to see politics, and its forlorn theodicy, not with despair, but muted celebration."

Who reads the Atlantic monthly?

James Fallows quotes (Atlantic Jan/Feb 2010) a Westpointer: "triumph of tactics over strategy." This is the inverse of boiling a frog. The triumph of tactics over strategy is when you keep improving on something that wasn't the right thing to do in the first place. If you toss a frog in a pot of boiling water, he'll hop out; if you put him cold water and put it on the stove, he'll never notice that he needs to do something about his environment.

Paul Starr claims (Atlantic Jan/Feb 2010) that "abundance brings scarcity: an abundance of media creates a scarcity of attention. So although journalists and politicians have new ways to reach the public, the public has acquired even more ways to ignore them." This sounds like "demand expands to exceed capacity" said of highways. More is less.

Who reads words, reads literature, or reads the world?

Jonathan Raban describes (LRB 5 Nov 09) lovingly how his mother taught him to read words: "I was a pushover for her deck of home-made flash cards and a game I found more fun than our previous sessions of Animal Snap."

As a bus conductor on a slow route in the 1950s, he read William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity: "Looking at the book now still brings back the old-bus smell of cigarettes, fish and chips, sweat, Polo mints, and ineffectual disinfectant. . . . Every piece of writing was like a pond, sunlit, overhung by willows, with clustering water lilies, and, perhaps, the rippling circle made by a fish rising to snatch a dying fly. This much could be seen and appreciated by any passing hiker. But the true life of pond lay below the surface, in deep water where only the attentive and experienced eye would detect the suspended clouds of midge larvae, the submarine shadow of the cruising pike, the exploding shoal of bug-eyed small fry."

Since then, Raban has made his living reading books and reading the world: "Trying to understand the habitat in which we live requires an ability to read it . . . Every inhabited landscape is a palimpsest, its original parchment nearly blackened with the cross-hatching of successive generations of authors, claiming the place as their own, and imposing their designs on it, as if their temporary interpretations would stand for ever. Later over-writing has obscured all but a few, incompletely erased fragments of the earliest entries, but one can still pick out a phrase here, a word there, and see how the most recently dried layer of scribble is already being partially effaced by fresh ink."

Did Vergil describe the first blogger?

Vergil introduces (Aeneid III.446-441) the Sibyl of Cumae as an introverted writer, who cares more about getting the words down than people understanding them. (Unlike most bloggers today, she later turns into a movie-ready special effect with glowing eyes and hair blowing in its own wind.) Robert Fagles' translation:

"Whatever verses the seer writes down on leaves
she puts in order, sealed in her cave, left behind.

There they stay, motionless, never slip from sequence.

But the leaves are light -- if the door turns on its hinge,

the slightest breath of air will scatter them all about

and she never cares to retrieve them, flitting through her cave,

or restore them to order, join them as verses within a vision."

I suppose, since readers don’t come to us for religion, we mortal writers should take more care to get their words in order.

If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

Charles Dickens parodies (Hard Times 1854) the overly educated teacher who knows so many theories and facts that he cannot teach a class, naming him Mr. M'Choakumchild. "He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, has been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.

"He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, coral music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. . . .

"He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the people, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass. . . .

"If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!"

Similarly, American school teachers with too many advanced degrees are too distant from their charges to teach well.

can government transparency learn from the epistemology of Islamic finance?

Jeremy Harding offers (LRB 14 May 2009) an epistemological account of transparency based on Islamic finance: "A contract for a contract, which is what many derivatives amount to, is a sign for a sign, not a sign for a thing; it introduces clutter and congestion into the realm of signs -- a realm of solemnity for practicing Muslims -- and erodes consensus on the value of underlying assets, just as riba (or interest) earned on a principal, like on like, turns money from a counter into an agent, to the detriment of authentic counters and legitimate agents."

According to a UK financier specializing in Islamic finance: "economies in which wealth transfer predominates over wealth creation are destined for poverty, because 'real' wealth -- food, medicine, bricks and mortar, high and low technology goods -- is consumed or decays and has to be renewed. Exchange on its own, however vigorous, is unable to do this renewing. A farm or a factory producing electronic parts is more desirable than a casino, even if they all put resources and people to work."

Similarly transparent governments need to show the thing itself, not a refabricated version. Post decision-making documents, not gussied up explanations; share actual decisions, not just spin; open up decision-making meetings, not just press conferences.