âWe already know what to expect from Noboaâs second term: more militarization at the expense of social programmes; more financialization, with the removal of controls on money laundering; privatizations, labour flexibilization and international investment treaties. Yet his plan to convene a Constituent Assembly marks an apparent shift from previous oligarchic governments. While the details remain unclear, it looks like the purpose of this body will be to give Noboaâs policies enough legitimacy so that they can be framed as a coherent national project â not just a series of piecemeal reforms to upwardly redistribute wealth, but a comprehensive programme to reverse correismo and roll back the gains of the 2008 Constitution: social rights, environmental protections, plurinationality, the role of the state in driving development, constraints on privatization and foreign military bases.â
âHumanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being in which the multiplicity of individuals are dissolved and into which these individuals are destined to be reabsorbed. As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognises to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful (which is not in dispute here) but also when it comes to happiness. There is no way of living with others which takes away the burden of being myself, which allows me to not have an opinion; there is no âinnerâ life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and a history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest. We are continually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people. Reason does not lie behind us, nor is that where the meeting of minds takes place: rather, both stand before us waiting to be inherited.â
â Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception (trans. Oliver Davis)
Zadie Smith's *The Fraud* is such an interesting investigation of the mystery of social relations. Extremely English! What exactly are our duties and obligations vis-a-vis others? Our freedoms?
What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires filling. With things like angry letters to The Times.
[T]he great majority of people turn out to be extraordinarily suggestible, with brains like sieves through which the truth falls. Fact and fiction meld in their minds.
Keep stealing, my friends! From life for fiction, and from fiction for life.
We mistake each other. Our whole social arrangement a series of mistakes and compromises. Shorthand for a mystery too large to be seen. If they knew what I knew they would feel as I do! Yet even once one had glimpsed behind the veil which separates people, as she had -- how hard it proves to keep the lives of others in mind! Everything conspires against it. Life itself.
The world was sunk in madness. It covered everything, like weather.
Mrs Touchet had a theory. England was not a real place at all. England was an elaborate alibi. Nothing real happened in England. Only dinner parties and boarding schools and bankruptcies. Everything else, everything the English really did and really wanted, everything they desired and took and used and discarded -- all of that they did elsewhere.
All of our names are only temporary, she reminded herself. Only notations for something beyond imagining. They can give shape to matters too big to be seen, but never can they wholly describe the mystery.
It all comes to a head in one of the later chapters, in a crucial argument between two characters. The chapter is worth quoting in full! Here's the core of it.
'[W]here freedom is concerned, Mrs Touchet, I would advise you not to wait for others to present a false gift of it to you. ... [M]y freedom is as fully my inheritance as it is any man's. It has no time, I need not wait for it, it was mine from the moment of my birth. ... [N]o trick or bargain or exchange or fraud or meek Christian hope will win for me what is mine in God's sight and in my own. For it was ALWAYS MINE. ... [I]t is not the prisoner's right to open his cell that is in question, Mrs Touchet! It is the gaoler's fraud in claiming to hold a man prisoner in the first place. ... Justice has no time, Mrs Touchet! It is eternal, it is now, it is yesterday, it is tomorrow. Every man branded like cattle feels that pain infinitely: it echoes across all time and all space. Joan of Arc still burns. The poor soul bound hand and foot and thrown from the Zong still sinks to the bottom of the sea, along with five hundred more just like him, and they all drown eternally. I tell you that those who suffer cannot wait. No more can I. And I confess that I am not one of these people who believe it makes so great a difference if the gaoler speaks softly to his prisoner or throws a stone at him. What really matters --'
'Then God have pity on you! It makes all the difference in the world. We sin by degrees, as we do everything else. Otherwise, why ameliorate, why attempt anything at all? That would be the counsel of despair. Let us not make the perfect the enemy of the good. For in the meantime, our souls hang in the balance. And in the gap between the present moment and some future moral perfection surely all we have --'
But before she could finish the boy laughed! Bitterly, was the word that came into her mind, the boy laughed bitterly, and threw his head back, his eyes flashing like lightning ... 'As if it could possibly be the state of my gaoler's soul that is my proper concern! No, that cannot be my proper concern, Mrs. Touchet. Only the cell concerns me. The illegitimate cell.'
Obsessed thinking about the urban turkeys we've unwittingly created ...
The birds themselves are responsible for their urban success story, Huck said. The species has simply proven to be highly adaptable. Some individuals were able to tolerate people better than others. They were smart enough to learn how to find new food sources and navigate new environments. The turkey populations that do well in cities have higher levels of stress hormones than their country cousins, he told me, but they seem to suffer less harm from those hormones as well. In fact, these birds are so well adapted to cities that you canât solve the âproblemâ of troublesome urban turkeys by returning them to nature. They arenât from there. âYou stick them in the middle of nowhere and theyâll wander around until they find another city to be successful in,â Huck said. [...]
Humans can change the world in ways that make it harder for a species to thrive. We can overhunt (or overeat). And we can try to correct our mistakes. But when we do that, we canât expect the species to be grateful and docile, primly refilling the exact ecological niche we drove it out of. Sometimes it finds a new gap to fit into. Sometimes a species comes back mean. [...]
For all their faults, we like urban turkeys because they are a symbol of resilience and independence ⊠and of simply not giving a damn. They donât owe us civility. They know it. And itâs a kind of glorious, transcendent glimpse of the power of nature that you could not possibly get in the woods.
Hereâs how they came to be such a presence. (It was a joint effort.)
The Hilary Tamar series by Sarah Caudwell (about a group of junior barristers who cluster around the Oxford don Tamar, a historian of law whose gender identity we never learn and who serves as the first-person narrator of several hilarious novels that delight in legal specificities and classical references)
âBeyond a given point [we are] not helped by more âknowing,â but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.â
perhaps before youâre allowed to complain about civilisational incompetence you have to at least demonstrate that youâve mastered basic double entry bookkeeping
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