Review: The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

One more review.

Review: The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell, who by any standard is one of the leading intellectual figures of the twentieth century. He was one of the very few leading intellectuals who opposed World War I. He was vilified, and in fact ended up in jail, like his counterparts in Germany. From the 1950s, particularly in the United States, he was bitterly denounced and attacked as a crazy old man who was anti-American. Why? Because he was standing up for the principles that other intellectuals also accepted, but he was doing something about it.

                                                                             Noam Chomsky 

There can be few books that have been titled with such wilful understatement as The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell. Any book which includes sections on philosophy, logic, mathematics, linguistics, relativity, education, ethics, psychology, history, politics, religion, metaphysics, epistemology, east/west relations and the future of the human race can hardly be described as basic.

Then again, by the standards of Bertrand Russell, perhaps this is basic. He was a prodigious writer on all of the above subjects and a great deal more and for years I have liberated copies of his many books with titles like Political Ideas, Sceptical Essays, In Praise of Idleness and The ABC of Relativity from second hand book shops.

I like Russell because he thought the things that may people think, but actually did something about them. He was born in 1874 to Lord and Lady Amberley, both of whom died when he was young, and he was raised by his grandmother, Lady Russell, in virtual isolation. It was expected by his elders that Russell would take up a career in politics, but his passion was for mathematics and philosophy. As a member of the ruling classes he could have taken the easy way out, acted as minister in a Liberal government, taken up his seat in the House of Lords, not been a bother to anyone. Instead, he went in the opposite direction, serving time in prison for his opposition to the First World War, being sacked from his professorship at City College in New York for his views on sexual liberation, vociferously supporting the campaign for nuclear disarmament. In 1957, Russell wrote an open letter to both Eisenhower and Khrushchev, calling for an end to the Cold War. Similarly, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he sent telegrams to both Khrushchev and John F Kennedy. Khrushchev assured him that Russia would not be reckless, whereas Kennedy returned his telegram unopened.

Most people would, I think, be glad to have lived half the life that Bertrand Russell lived, displayed half the bravery and understated intelligence that Russell displayed. What comes across from reading this collection of articles isn’t just the sheer depth and breadth of subjects of which Russell was informed enough to talk about, but also serves as reminder that simple ideas and statements sometime need to be reiterated. In my own writing, I often reject trains of thought as they seem so obvious that it would be patronising even to mention them.

Yet simple ideas aren’t always obvious to everyone and even when they are, they bare restatement as a kind of reset button when the world seems to have lost its mind. Russell’s thoughts on religion, politics and education are often simple but never simplistic. It’s worth being reminded that the purpose of education isn’t to teach but to indoctrinate, to question why agnosticism towards God or heaven is any less sensible that agnosticism toward Zeus or Thor, to remind politicians that global conflict is in no one’s best interest except the manufactures of the weapons. Russell never tired of stating and restating his thoughts on these subjects.

Russell’s principal academic pursuits though were in the regions of philosophy and mathematics and there is much in this volume regarding both subjects. Philosophy is often used as a dirty word in the scientific disciplines, yet I think many physicists would benefit from a working knowledge of philosophy, as would philosophers benefit from a little knowledge of basic physical principles. Sadly it is often a case of never, or rarely, the twain shall meet and before Russell, the last significant mathematician-philosopher was probably Rene Descartes in the 17^th century. Russell wrote two major works on the history of philosophy, A History of Western Philosophy and Wisdom of the West, sections from both of which are included here. A History of Western Philosophy in particular has been used as a standard textbook in British institutions for many years and I can highly recommend it for anyone who wants a good overview of the subject, as well as a critical overview of some of the major triumphs and failures in thought of the philosophers in question,  through from Socrates to John Dewey.

For a general overview of the work and thoughts of Bertrand Russell himself however, you could do worse than start with The Basic Writings of… At 736 pages, you certainly get a lot for your money and while you will almost certainly find some of it going over your head (it has taken me three abortive attempts to get past the sections relating to Russell’s Magnus Opus, Principia Mathmatica), time spent with Bertrand Russell is never time wasted. He was a rare breed, of which maybe only the likes of Noam Chomsky or Tony Benn bear comparison. He was politically active right until the end of his life, spending seven days in prison in 1961 for his involvement in anti-nuclear demonstrations at the ripe old age of 89.

Russell died aged 97 on the 2 February 1970, exactly three years to the day before I was born. I would like to have known him, but he left such a plethora of publications that settling for the next best thing isn’t a million miles away from this desire. Our great and prolific writers get read less and less these days. It is our duty to reintroduce them to new generations. There is much that they can teach us.

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Cultural Fascism

This...

Cultural Fascism

The advent of the MP3 player, Spotify and the like means that many kids growing up in the 21^st century will never know the joy of listening to an album from start to finish. It’s not just kids either. My mother works from home and listens to her iPod on shuffle the way that many people do. It’s part of the growing trend of slowly wearing away attention spans. Society is bound to collapse not out of any ecological or natural disaster but by no one being able to pay attention to anything long enough to learn anything, an idea which I believe was explored in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (When the Bough Breaks).

Maybe it’s because I’m a reader, but I still think there’s something intrinsically beautiful about the internal narrative of a well-crafted album. I do use an MP3 player to listen to music these days, which makes life a lot easier. The first time I went backing around Europe, I had to have a separate backpack just to carry all my tapes for a three month trip. These days I can carry enough music and audio plays to last a year on my phone. However, I miss the days of vinyl. I miss the way that an album not only had an internal narrative, but were structured in acts over two, four or more sides. I miss stacking albums and singles on to the central spindle and watching each disc slide down on to the turntable like a stripper sliding down a pole. That was as near to shuffle as we got in those days. Listening to one half of half a dozen albums, then flipping the lot over. These days vinyl seems almost steampunk. Yet there was something undoubtedly romantic it about it. You never hear anyone speak with the same sense of quixotic nostalgia about compact discs.

 

I don’t use Spotify and I don’t listen to music on shuffle, ever. If I listen to music then I’m in for the long haul, the whole album, start to finish. Especially if I’m reading then I like a consistent soundtrack. On more than one occasion I have listened to the entire five odd hours of Bitches Brew in a single mammoth reading session. Or twelve Dylan albums or the complete Clash or Radiohead discography in a row while writing. Perhaps it also has to do with my continually shifting mood. Music soothes the savage beast, but it also preserves him in a state of suspended animation when he’s in a productive mood.

Then again, I am a cultural fascist and so I also think that what separates me from the Spotify generation is that I listen to good music. If you’re listening to Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga then I can understand why you wouldn’t be able to stomach a whole album’s worth. It’s like eating a large bag of Haribo. Full of sugar and of no nutritional value.

The strength of western society has always been predicated on population control and whereas technology should be enhancing our lives, it is instead being used as a weapon to keep people fractured by decimating their attention spans, much in the same way that incessant, structured ad breaks have been used in the USA for years. TV in the US seems to be less a form of entertainment and more a device for psychological conditioning. Online subscription services are slowly eroding the advertising industry’s half century strangle hold on TV, but who knows how long that will last. One would imagine that as the balance shifts from broadcast to internet media the advertisers will arrive like Killer Whales beaching on the shore.

And now a word from our sponsors: Download ad blocking software to your internet browser of choice today.

Under these circumstances, one would hope that the ones who mentally fight these assaults upon the senses will have a distinct advantage over the rest. There is no doubt that people are getting more stupid, spend five minutes on an any comments section if you don’t believe me. I’m not someone who watches shit films for the sake of it or sits on Twitter complaining about The Apprentice or Question Time or whatever. Not only are we becoming more stupid, but we are forgoing intellectual advancement and artistic creation in favour of pissing over anything anyone one else creates.

You will rarely read here any article in which I slag off or pick on an artist, musician or film. There is plenty that I don’t like, but I tend to try and just ignore it. There are seven billion people on the world, you, me, everyone is bound to be unattracted to most of what goes on in the world. Yet the need for instant gratification and the celebrity culture that has infected society like a disease that causes severe brain damage means that it’s easier to attack the efforts of others. Instead of commenting on the latest bunch of unpleasant wankers on The Apprentice, you could be learning a new language or going to art classes. Instead of arguing on Twitter about Toby Young’s thoughts on the NHS on Question Time, you could be out helping your community or joining a local Amnesty International group. And here’s a question for you: Why do supposedly intelligent people watch Question Time? A program featuring a panel of politicians. It’s like you want to lied to.

I have all but stopped watching television. I don’t have a TV of my own and what little I watch is usually a BBC Four program of iPlayer or something created by Dan Harmon watched using a proxy server to make the internet think I’m in the US. And even then I have my ad blocker enabled to skip through the commercials. That’s anarchy in my book (humour).

Aside from that, I read, I listen to albums, I struggle to learn new languages, I memorise the Shipping Forecast areas and Rimbaud poems in the original French in order to keep my memory keen. I listen to what I want, watch what I want, read what I want and if there is no prospect of me enjoying something then I don’t do it. Everyone should be so lucky.

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A Piece of P.I.E.

A short piece on language.

A Piece of P.I.E.

P.I.E. or Proto-Indo-European is a supposed language that was the precursor to a number of Indo-European languages spoken today. These include the Indo-Iranian subset of languages (Hindi, Urdu, Kurdish, Persian, etc), the Celtic languages and the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish etc). Indo-European also includes the Germanic languages, including all of the Nordic languages, plus German, Yiddish, Dutch, Afrikaans and English.

P.I.E. was first postulated by Sir Williams Jones in the eighteenth century. Jones served as a judge in India during British colonial rule, but also had a love for languages and for India and he came to notice a number of similarities between certain words in Sanskrit, from which developed most languages spoken on the subcontinent today, to those in Latin and Ancient Greece.

We can see this when we, for instance, compare words for God in the three languages. In Greek, the full name of Zeus was originally Zeu pater, meaning father Zeus or sky father. Jupiter, father Jove, was once Iupiter, sky father (piter here meaning father). And in Sanskrit the word, Dyau piter, also means sky father, which comes into Old English as Tiw, from where modern English gets the word, Tuesday. All of these words have their origin in the Proto-Indo European phrase, Dyeus peter, meaning father of the daytime sky. The father of the daytime sky being the sun, surely explaining why believers look to the sky when offering thanks or prayers even to this day.

From studying the similarities between such words, linguists have been able over the last three centuries to reconstruct a likely vocabulary being spoken in Europe (probably Eastern Europe, around the Caspian) five and a half thousand years ago. Studying this vocabulary teaches us a great deal about the ideas that came to shape the languages spoken in Europe and Asia to this day. To take just one example, consider the words in P.I.E. that are thought to be a fairly accurate approximation of the words used for family relationships:

meHter: Mother

pHter: Father

bhreHter: Brother

dhugHter: Daugher

sunHnu: Son

daiHuer: Brother-in-Law

geneH: Wife

Which can all be seen to share the hard aspirated sound, H. The significance of this only becomes apparent when we consider a further group of P.I.E. family words:

swesor: Sister

snusos: Sister-in-Law

suekru: Mother-in-Law

None of which are aspirated. Put simply, what separates the first group from the second is that the first group are all people that the head of a household might be expected to bury in a close knit patriarchal society. A man would certainly be expected to make funeral arrangements for his own parents, his wife and, in the days when infant mortality ran high, his own children. He would also be expected to bury his own brother rather than being left to his brother’s wife and the same would apply to the man who married his sister.

Yet the sister herself would be buried by her own husband or the head of the family that she had been married into. We would expect that a father would bury his own daughter if she died young, but if she survived much beyond puberty, she would quickly be married off to another man, before her own brother assumed control of the family upon his father’s death.

Similarly, the burial rights of a sister-in-law or a mother-in-law would in most cases be handled by the husbands and sons of the women in question, where they would be known as wife or simply mother, an eternal bond commemorated in the use of the hard H sound in their respective Proto-Indo-European titles. The hard H indicates not only filial responsibility but also possession.

The same is true of the use of pronouns in P.I.E. Words which are self-reflective (I, me, mine etc.) tend to employ that hard H sound (egH, Hme. Hmeghi, Hmeme etc.). Other pronouns don’t use this H sound, but take forms we more or less recognise in modern language: tu – you (s), yu  - you (plural), wei – we. Although this pattern is slightly broken up by the self-reflexive pronoun for oneself – se, or swe.

Still, it’s interesting to see how one rough breathing sound came to denote possession and responsibility to the speakers of P.I.E. To the Greeks, that rough breathing sound wasn’t significant enough even to warrant a letter of its own, the letter h being a relatively recent language innovation. It is more a guttural sound than anything recognisable as language and it is to be assumed that the ideas of family, leadership and burial predate language itself.

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Perseverance

Time to get back on track:

Perseverance

As much as I can be said to possess any positive qualities, I would say that my two greatest skills are that 1) once I learn something, I know if for all time (with some minor revision), and 2) that if I really want to know or be able to do something, I persevere with it until it is done.

That perseverance can take twenty years or more, but I get there in the end. It took me fourteen years to give up smoking, almost from the day I started smoking at sixteen until the day I finally gave up at thirty. I used to give up two or three times a week for an hour or two, until the withdrawal kicked in and I’d go scurrying off to the shops. Even in the final year of school, my friend and me would vow to give up smoking walking out of the school gates and be coppering up for fags by the time we got near home.

At thirty, something changed and I finally quit. Aside from a couple of drags on tobacco laden joints, I haven’t had a cigarette in eleven years. To anyone looking to quit, I can only repeat the advice that an ex-smoker gave me as I was going through my finally successful attempt: Get through the first three hours, then the first three days, then the first three weeks and then you are done with it and out. It’s good advice. The geometric progression appeals to the mathematical part of my brain. Time doubling up at each stage until the nicotine is out of your system. I persevered and it finally got done, probably early enough in my life to suffer no long term lasting damage to my body.

The same applies to languages. I, like most people born in an English speaking country, have no natural aptitude for language. I’m an expert in the English language, I know many of its tricks and my study of the works of James Joyce have left me with an appreciation for the mechanics of language to the point where I can usually say not only what I want to say but pick the way to say it that is most appropriate to the situation.

In many ways, English suffers from its own success. It is probably the most versatile language in the world. I often notice that in writing a sentence, even a single clause in a sentence, the same idea can be expressed in as many as a dozen different ways. English is built upon the vocabulary and grammar of so many different languages, Saxon, French, Greek, Latin etc., that it has achieved unparalleled power in the world. There are more widely spoken languages in the world, but English in the international business language, which effectively makes it the most powerful language in the world. So why bother to learn anything else?

Like most British people, I learnt French at school and was useless at it. Maths I can do in my sleep. It’s just a bunch of rules you have to learn and apply. Language has many more shades of grey. Yet I would always feel like a failure if I didn’t learn to speak at least one other language, no matter how inept I am at languages. I’ve been trying to get the hang of French now, on and off, for over twenty years.

In learning another language you are really learning about your own language. Which is what takes the time to become bilingual. If perseverance if one of my greatest skills, then one of my more annoying flaws if that I have to learn every last thing about something before I can learn any of it. At university studying physics, simply not knowing how to properly pronounce the name of a Greek letter could throw my understanding of an equation right off. In learning French, the problem has always been that the translations given of certain words and phrases are obviously not the literal translation, but an approximation, and this always thrown me off. I need to know the literal translation and history of that phrase or word. If I’m going to speak another language then I want to be able to think like a speaker of that language, not just do a poor impersonation of one.

I persevere with French for two very good reasons. One is that French is one of the cornerstones of the English language. Most of us already speak an adapted version of French. Every time you talk of eating beef or pork, of regarding something or of putting a cordon around something, you are using words left over from the French conquest of England in 1066. I persevere with French for the same reason that I’ve taken to teaching myself Latin and Classical Greek, because in learning its founding languages I gain a better understanding of English itself.

The other reason I persevere with French is that there are so many French writers, Emile Zola, Sartre, Rousseau, Rimbaud, that I’ve read and love in translation and want to read in their native language, as they were written with the right rhythms and shades of meaning. I am currently reading Le Mur, a collection of short stories by John-Paul Sartre and finding that I am understanding about half of it. That’s progress and a sign of what perseverance can do. I have this fantasy, which I also kind of know to be true, that it will have taken me twenty years to become bilingual and then learn four or five languages in a only a couple of years. More than French authors, my true linguistic ambition is to be able to read Chekov and Dostoyevsky in their native tongues. However, one step at a time. French first. I’ll work my way up to Russian.

For anyone who want to learn a new language but possesses my level ineptitude, here’s a few things I’ve learnt. Firstly, learn body parts, the five senses and types of thought. Any language is after all an attempt at telepathy, to communicate what is in your head for another person to understand, and so the first job is to define who you are in that language. Start with the head, the trunk, the arms and legs, moving to the eyes, ears, nose, fingers and toes etc. Then see, hear, speak, read, write, think. Also, probably the most important word in any language and the one usually with a multitude of changing forms is the verb, to be. Get that one down before all others. So many other words are invariably based around the verb, to be.

The other piece of advice I can offer as a writer is to immediately disregard the nouns and verbs. Verbs nouns and their associate adjectives and adverbs make up the bulk of any language and just have to be learnt. However, as discussed in a previous article, while function words (articles, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns) account for only a handful of words in any given language, they can make up as much as half of all text and speech. Learn them first and keep refreshing your memory at regular intervals and you will find that you will at least be able to get the sense of any piece of written text. It’ll stand you in good stead as you go through learning everything else.

I guess the most difficult thing I have found to persevere at has been as a writer. I wanted to be a writer from the age of about sixteen and yet it took me until my mid thirties to find myself comfortable enough to be able to write. It’s back to that need to know everything in order to know anything. I wanted everything to be perfect first time without effort and as long as I had to try at writing, I found I couldn’t write. Part of the reason for trying to write and post new articles everyday has been to train my brain to sit down with the shape of an article in mind and be able to colour in that shape on the page in a single session. Of late I have got lazy and found myself digging around old journals and notebooks looking for something half decent to post, simply because I don’t feel like writing today. Yet the point of this exercise is to write every day, not just edit old stuff. I’m pleased to say that this entire article is being written off the top of my head, from scratch, in a single writing session, with little more than a title and a rough shape for what I want to write. Because I persevere and I always get there in the end.

Perseverance, it’s not just a song by Terrorvision about whales and dolphins. It’s also necessary in learning a new skill or to becoming an artist. If it doesn’t happen first time, no matter. Keep going, keep trying, even if you’re useless at it. I’ve been learning guitar on and off for thirty years and I’m still appalling. But I’ll keep persevering for the simple enjoyment that playing brings me. Which is all anyone can really expect out of life.

See Also (click link)

Functional Content

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Best Things Ever #18 Bill Hicks: Rant in E-Minor

Today we mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks. 

Best Things Ever #18

Bill Hicks: Rant in E-Minor

“Bill Hicks, blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a gun around. Pay attention to Rant in E Minor, it is a major work, as important as Lenny Bruce's. He will correct your vision. His life was cut short by cancer, though he did leave his tools here. Others will drive on the road he built. Long may his records rant even though he can't.”

          Tom Waits

Twenty years ago this month, the comedian Bill Hicks died of pancreatic cancer at the tragically young age of 32. Three years later in 1997, two posthumous album were released by Rykodisc: Arizona Bay and Rant in E-Minor. In this article I am going to concentrate on Rant in E Minor, which I consider to be both the greatest comedy album and the greatest spoken word album of all time.

The material for Rant in E Minor was recorded at the Laff Stop Comedy Club in Austin, Texas in March and October 1993 and at Coobs, San Francisco in July of the same year. Unlike the albums Dangerous and Relentless that were released during Bill’s lifetime, Rant in E Minor, as well as Arizona Bay, presents the material in the form of chapter points rather than as a traditional live comedy album. It’s more like a concept album, the live material interspersed with musical interludes performed by Bill and his producer and childhood friend, Kevin Booth.

I’ve always found the music on Arizona Bay to be somewhat intrusive, though it’s still a good album (it’s a Bill Hicks album). With Rant in E Minor though, the music is pitched perfectly and serves to divide the seventy five minute album into a series of movements or acts.

The other thing to say about Rant in E Minor is that most of the material included is unique to this one album. There have been a number of subsequent albums released, as well as countless bootlegs of other Bill Hicks’s gigs, which all have significant overlap between them. Yet aside from the bootleg of his final gig at Igby’s, which does include some of the material featured on Rant in E Minor, it’s a pretty unique set list. Even the Igby’s set contains many well-worn routines that you won’t find on Rant in E Minor.

Rant in E Minor is Bill Hicks at his bravest, his angriest, his most free and his most engaging. The material from the later recordings at the Laff Stop was recorded when he knew he was ill and any pretence that Bill was holding back at all is gone. To hear him screaming at his audience, “You fucking morons, you fucking morons.” is cathartic. As Hicks himself says:

“That’s what this is all about, man. It’s supposed to be a fucking catharsis, man, you know. It’s supposed to be a release from the fucking daily grind.”

In that catharsis, Hicks takes aim at the anti-abortion lobby, Christianity, Billy Ray Cyrus, the perpetrators of the raid on the Waco complex, including Bill Clinton and Janet Reno, homophobia in the military, women who defend abusive partners and Rush Limbaugh. One of the reasons that the comedy of Bill Hicks stands the test the time is both because of the universality of it content matter, but also, depressingly, because of how little seems to have changed and how much has come full circle in twenty years. If Bill was alive today, instead of riffing about hosting a TV show called, ‘Let’s Hunt and Kill Bill Ray Cyrus’ it would be have to be called, ‘Let’s Hunt and Kill Miley Cyrus (with special guest, Robin Thicke)’. Rush Limbaugh is still allowed a platform from which to spout his moronic opinions. The show Cops has been replaced by a thousand and one equally fascistic “reality TV” programs and rather than senselessly slaughtering women and children in Waco, Texas, it is instead in Pakistan and the Yemen that women and children are gunned down with drones by executioners who never leave the comfort of their armchair in some military base in the desert wilds of the United States, or have the decency to look their victims once in the eye.

I think Bill Hicks would be appalled at the level to which soldiers have been elevated to the level of heroes, protectors of freedom, even as they are used as instruments of brute terror and blunt force to destroy freedom in favour of corporate profit. He was never one to shy away from criticism of the military, questioning why a suicide bomber was a coward but firing Cruise missiles from a ship hundreds of miles away in the Gulf was a heroic act. In dealing with the issue of gay people serving in the armed forces, Hicks says:

“Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in... I don’t care how many sit ups you can do, put on a helmet, go wait in that fox-hole, we’ll tell you when we need you to kill somebody.”

Now, I’m sure that Bill didn’t really mean a lot of the things he said but, like Jonathan Swift, used extreme views to present certain arguments as reducio ad absurdium, as well as a way to get laughs. My parents met in the Royal Navy and I exist because of the armed forces, so I tend to give serving personal the benefit of the doubt that they are merely following orders and they simply trust that those orders are given in good faith. Yet I don’t think there is anything particularly heroic about following orders, especially when the Nuremberg Trials established that “I was only following orders” is not a valid defence (although Nuremberg also established the invasion of another sovereign state to be the supreme international crime under law, but that doesn’t seem to stop us).

For all the supposed threat from Al Qaida in the last decade or so, the simple fact of the matter is that the most successful terrorist organisation in the last hundred years is the CIA. More coups against democratic regimes and more loss of innocent life than Al Qaida could ever even dream of taking. They kill thousands, we kill hundreds of thousands in retaliation. In America the repeated mantra is, “Support the troops, they protect your freedom. “ If you need protecting, you are not free. And all that all this killing really achieves is to intensify the level of retaliation that will be visited upon your children after the empire falls. You would think that the richest country in the world would have at least grasped the basic fact that all debts get called in eventually. That’s karma, man. It’s also the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Bill’s routine on gays in the military manages to correct one of the niggles I have with his early routines, especially on Dangerous and Sane Man, where his material is somewhat homophobic (although he did out George Michael several years before George’s own actions did it for him). Again, this could simply be a matter of taking things to extremes for deliberate comic effect. I like when graphic images of gay sex are used as a weapon against homophobes and other fatheads, so Hicks’s observation that Rush Limbaugh reminds him of “one of those gay guys who likes to lay in a tub while other men pee on him.” is especially brilliant. Although it gets too graphic for me when he comes to the part about Barbara Bush unrolling her flaccid labia, then shitting in Limbaugh’s mouth. Then I have to skip forward.

I’ve described Rant in E Minor as my favourite spoken word album, as well as my favourite comedy album, because as funny as Rant in E Minor is, it also represents Bill Hicks at his most philosophical. The power of comedy is in its repeatability and yet with Rant in E Minor there are so many lines that are as much like stanzas from Dylan’s It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) as anything else and worth listening to whenever you are feeling down or need a call to action. As well as his comments on catharsis, one further example will suffice here:

“The argument doesn’t work with me Flapjack. Go back to your fucking crackerjack lifestyle and I’ll meet you at the evolution bell curve. I’ll be sitting there awhile, it’s kind of a tortoise and the hare story.”

Many comedians and sitcoms can make me laugh till I cry, even after I know every word, but there is only Rant in E Minor that can make me actually cry. To hear Bill talk about thinking about taking his own life, but not having the balls to do it, and to realise that in that instant he is facing up to his mortality and the fact that he is going to die is heart breaking to hear. He’d struggled to build an audience in his home country, but was a star across the Atlantic. He was about to have his own TV show for real in Britain and died right on the cusp of major success. On that day, the world lost a true comedy genius.

In many ways, Bill Hick was a visionary and a man ahead of his time. Some of his material, like his alter-ego, Pan the Randy Goat-Boy, was considered extreme at the time. His honest discussions of his use of pornography were not applauded by all and yet to listen to many comedians these days, his comedy seems somewhat mild by comparison. The ubiquity of the internet, it seems, has made us more voyeuristic and more cruel.

If you read Agent of Evolution, the Bill Hicks biography consisting of interviews with the people who knew him, you see that there were elements of his life about which he didn’t talk openly (like visiting brothels and experimenting with just about every drug yet invented, not just the fashionable ones). He could go too far sometimes, but there was also as much that he held back. Compare that with, say, the average Doug Stanhope routine, where very little is censored or held back. I love Doug Stanhope, by the way.

There has been a lot written about Hicks in the media in this twentieth anniversary week, especially by other comedians. He has been lauded as a fine comedian, but some question his elevation to the level of Messiah. I don’t think Hicks was the Messiah, but I do think that some art and artists transcend the medium in which they exist. Was Shakespeare just another playwright? Is the Mona Lisa just another portrait? When Billie Holiday sang Strange Fruit to hushed audiences, was that just another artist singing another jazz standard?

There’s nothing wrong with being a comedian, making people laugh is a fine way to make a living, but it doesn’t mean that some comedians can’t transcend comedy. Bill Hicks wasn’t/isn’t the Messiah but with the greatest respect to many other comedians that I listen to and love, neither was Bill Hicks just another comedian. He was somewhere halfway between comedian and Messiah and his genius in no way devalues the comedy of others, only drags it up by its bootstraps. If you want to realise the potential of stand-up comedy, listen to Rant in E Minor.

It’s hard to say what Bill Hicks would be doing if he were alive today, 52 and grumpier than ever, but I like to imagine him having his own weekly podcast. Anyone who listens to Greg Proops’s podcast, The Smartest Man in the World, can get a sense of what that might have sounded like. Proops has his own style, his own rhythms and way of doing things, but he also channels the spirit of Bill Hicks, frequently citing Hicks as the bravest comedian he ever saw. The Smartest Man in the World is one of the highlights of my week and I can highly recommend it.

It’s useless to dwell on what might have been, only what is. Bill Hicks died too young, but his comedy lives on through his recorded material. Rant in E Minor is his crowning achievement and remains a call to action against hopelessness. If he could be this funny and thought provoking as he was dying, imagine what we can achieve even as we live.

Get it done.

See also (click link)

Best Things Ever #8 Roadmaps for the Soul: The Music of Bill Hicks

Functional Content

Today, language and education.  

Functional Content

Around ten years ago, I started to do an Open University degree in English and Philosophy. It seemed tailor made for me, modules on Shakespeare and Political Philosophy, all but one of the core texts of which I had already read at least once. To start though you had to do an Introduction to the Humanities course, which ran over three or four months, consisting of three short essays and one longer, final essay.

If I’m honest, my entire effort consisted of no more than about five or six evenings in total. It therefore might not surprise you to learn that I failed the course. However, I didn’t fail because of the standard of my final essay, which was marked as good and excellent. No, I failed because I hadn’t written up an essay plan. Or, rather, I had been too honest in stating that I didn’t find an essay plan to be beneficial or conducive to my way of working.

When I sit down to write, I usually have a rough idea of what I want to say. I might write down some notes, work out a few snags in a blank document, but the challenge always in writing is to translate the thing in my head as accurately as possible onto the page. If I thought about it too much, the quantum state might collapse. Essay plan be dammed.

For me this perfectly demonstrates the problems with the education system. Without wishing to turn into Johnny Rotten, education has little to do with learning, much more about learning to conform to fixed ideas. If one is going to be an engineer or a doctor, then obviously one has a lot to learn in order to qualify. These are useful professions. Yet law, history, the humanities and the like are much more about opinion and so opinions have to be reined in at an early age. Contrary to popular myth, not everyone can be a President or a Prime Minister, there are enough checks and balances in place at each and every level of the hierarchy to weed out anyone who is liable to upset the established order. As Noam Chomsky once remarked, no one tells the editor of the New York Times what to publish, if he had to be told he wouldn’t be editor.

As any smart child knows, you don’t go to school to learn, you go to school to learn how to pass exams. You learn to regurgitate the facts that the state wants you to accept as truth. That’s how you progress. Lately, this has been even more the case with our current Secretary of Education, Michael Gove. I am championing the cause to have Michael Gove be known as Mr Gradgrind by common consent, after the headmaster in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times:

"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

Which sums up the government’s education reforms quite nicely. Better to have children recite the names of Henry VIII’s wives than learn anything about the women themselves, or what their treatment teaches us about the history of misogyny and murder in the state. Why consider anything of the causes or consequences of the First World War, when we have a manmade myth to trot out for each new generation, one of assassinated Archdukes and Belgian neutrality?

History lessons already skip the bits of the First World War that have to do with empire building and the rush to acquire oil to fuel the recently converted British and German Navies. They also miss out the bit about Britain almost certainly being defeated without the late involvement of the Americans. My memory of school history lessons is the Germans of the First World War being portrayed as almost indistinguishable from the Nazis. Yet the Nazis wouldn’t have come to power at all without the humiliations that were visited upon the German people at the end of the war, leading to the Weimar Republic.

History is written by the winners. It also saves them the trouble of having to take responsibility for their own mistakes. And those who fail to learn mistakes of history are doomed forever to repeat them.

Michael Gove and the rest of the Tory party want to muddy the waters even further and portray the war as one big jape, all lads together, bashing the baby killing Boche. Most Tories probably yearn for the days of the First World War, because it was an era before the welfare state, where industrialists and the landed gentry could send millions of the lower classes to their deaths in sacrifice to their gods of profit motive. These days if they want to kill poor people, they have to send them to ATOS rather than the Somme.

American Physicist Richard Feynman describes how his father used to educate him as a boy. How he would point to a bird in a tree and tell his son that he could teach him the name of the bird in English, Chinese and Portuguese, on and on until, “you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when you’ve finished with all that, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.” Which is in stark contrast to our education system. At school we learn all the names for the various parts of speech, noun, verb, adjective and adverb; article, conjunction, preposition and ting (or a pronoun, as its also called). It’s this kind of learning that causes children to correctly exclaim, “When am I going to need to know that?” Probably never. Not unless you go on to do a language degree.

There is a more useful division to the parts of speech that is rarely taught at any level. One that can help people to listen and communicate more effectively and one which only requires the knowledge of two groups of words. I have already alluded to them in the previous paragraph. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are collectively known as content words, whereas your articles, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns are function words.

A content word is one which, well it provides content. A single word tends to contain a lot of information. For instance, consider the word, ‘man’. What can we say about it? At face value, very little, except that it’s a noun, it’s singular and it’s male. Closer examination however reveals much more information and allows us to make a whole range of assumptions.

Not only is ‘man’ a noun, but it is a concrete noun, describing a real world object, as opposed to an abstract noun like ‘fear’ or ‘opinion’. It also describes an animate object, unlike ‘stone’ or ‘toothbrush’ both of which are inanimate and unlikely to move of their own volition (excepting some kind of dream or fantasy sequence). And a ‘man’ is human, with self awareness, free will and the power of speech, unlike a cat or a dog. He is also likely to forget your birthday or to do the dishes or put the bins out (right ladies).

Now, consider the function word, ‘I’. What can we say here? Well, again we can see that it’s a pronoun, singular, unlike ‘we’, and takes the nominative form, as opposed to the accusative case, ‘me’. It’s likely to be the first word in a phrase that describes some action that the speaker is performing (‘I went to the shops’, ‘I feel sick’, ‘I noticed you looking at me’ etc.), but not much else. The speaker could be anyone, a man or women, an anthropomorphised cat, dog or toothbrush, even fear itself, depending on the context.

The job of function words is to flesh out sentences and give form to the content words. What’s interesting is that while in English function words account for no more than a few hundred words amongst the hundreds of thousands of content words, they can account for as much as much as half of everything we say. Amongst social groups, text messages or the language of teenagers, there can very little function without any loss of meaning. A text message which says, “Went shops today. Bought a coat.” makes perfect sense, even though it consists of two verbs, three nouns and only a single indefinite article, missing out four function words which would normally be required to make the message make sense (“I went to the shops. I bought a coat.”).

In academic writing, function can exceed fifty percent of the total word count. This is largely because many of those reading or writing such work will speak English as a second language and meaning, context and tone therefore have to be hammered out to a tedious degree. The same is true of legal documentation. It’s why academic papers and legal documents are usually so dry.

This can also be the reason why people can find themselves in trouble posting messages on Twitter. Being restricted to 140 characters, Twitter is essentially a text message that ends up being read by strangers who know nothing about you. Given Twitter’s restrictive nature, function is sacrificed for content, which in turn sacrifices tone and context. Whereas a friend may be able to interpret a sarcastic comment as sarcastic, because they know you and can hear your tone of voice, a stranger is more likely to misunderstand.

It’s The Inverse Law of Twitter Exchange, that the more complex the idea under discussion, the more likely it is to be misunderstood by one or more parties involved. Watch a Twitter Feed for any length of time and you will see at least one celebrity tweeting the words, “It was a joke. #ironyfail/#twitterfail” Twitter is good for promoting oneself, highlighting interesting articles or cat videos, it even allows comedians to hone the brevity of their stand up routines, but as a form of communication it’s slightly worse than saying nothing. These days I mainly use it as a kind of zip file, linking to articles like this, where the function words are allowed to roam free.

In the wider world of 141 characters or more, a greater awareness of function can help us to make sense of the world and weed out the ones who are trying to take advantage of us. Whereas function words tell us very little when taken in isolation, they are highly enlightening when considered in clusters. Take the last two sentences, for example. Notice how I’ve used the word ‘us’ three times. I, the writer, am trying to ingratiate myself to you, the reader, by describing ‘us’ using the same first person plural pronoun. It’s a common political trick. However (and I will leave to judge how much of the following you believe), ‘us’ is the accusative form of the nominative first person plural pronoun, ‘we’. This demonstrates at a stroke that I am using the passive voice, rather than the active voice. I could have said something like, We can make greater sense of the world if we pay closer attention to the use of function words.

My use of the passive voice is indicative of the level within society that I consider myself to be at, and, by extension, the level that I consider you, the reader, to be at. Moreover, ‘us’ is a more inclusive pronoun than ‘we’. Politicians say ‘we’. “We’re all in this together.” is a typical example, which is pretty meaningless when you think about it. It’s like a prison warder saying, “We’re all at the same prison.” Yes, but some of ‘us’ get to go home in the evening. There is also that most famous example from recent years, “Yes we can.” which again is pretty devoid of meaning and, given everything that’s happened since Barrack Obama’s election, is only half the real slogan, which is, “Yes we can; you won’t be allowed to.”

There are many other examples of what function words can tell us about a speaker. People who use too many personal pronouns, ‘my’, ‘mine’ etc are likely to be more selfish. People who speak about themselves in the second person are more likely to be withdrawn or lacking in empathy than others. Someone who says, “You go to the shops and you find it’s the same five companies every twenty yards.” is probably more narrow minded than someone who says, “Every time I go to the shops, it’s the same five companies every twenty yards.” because the latter speaker is recognising that this is only their opinion, while the former is more likely to believe that their opinion is the only valid one. It’s all in the function words.

People who talk about themselves in the third person should be given a wide berth. Robert Maher speaks this and IT IS LAW.

Paying attention to the function in speech is essential to assessing the sincerity of the speaker. Whether someone uses the referential determiner ‘this’ or ‘that’ can speak volumes about whether they feel close to an object or issue or are trying to distance themselves from it. 

If there was any political will to educate children or the public in general, the difference between content and function words would be the first thing about English grammar that we were taught. Yet in a system where subservience and conformity are all, anything of any practical use is kept sealed off in the upper echelons of English language degrees. I’m extremely well read yet I heard about content and function words not from a book on English, but in a New Scientist article. Luckily for the established order, the sciences and humanities have now been kept isolated from each other for a century or more.

That said, the difference between content and function words is something that I’ve always known, I just didn’t know that I knew it. When I speak about this to other people, they say the same. It’s probably something most people know about, they just haven’t been taught what it means.

I end today with Lewis Carroll’s classic nonsense poem, Jabberwocky. Notice however that only the contents words are nonsense, making the poem broadly readable. Without the regulating presence of it function words, the poem really would make no sense.

Education is like everything else. If you want it done properly, you have to do it yourself.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'

He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Get it done.