Pseud's Corner (def) - "listing pompous and pretentious quotations from the media"

The aim, if you want to make it into future installments of Pseud's Corner Australia, is to somehow strike the perfect balance between pomposity and meaninglessness or between cliche' and an inflated sense of the importance of your own opinions (and preferably have yourself published in print or on-line). You'd think it'd be quite hard, but it's not - at least going on the following easy-to-access horrors from the past six months.

Nominations for July's Pseud's Corner are now open. Send all suggestions to: pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au   

Australia has been enriched, challenged and changed by taking a stronger and more complex place on the world stage, rather than just selling ourselves as a great beach resort populated by smiling out-doorsy larrikins. Now, I know this from my own experience. I know this from having worked recently with Benedict Andrews. I know this from seeing a growth in my own husband's work. We can justify ourselves with economic indicators and KPIs and graphs but it just makes us look like any other industry, and we are not. . . The arts operate at the very core of human identity and existence. They operate at the cutting edge of a science that is now trying to unravel the puzzle of consciousness and identity. (Cate Blanchett, Australian Performing Arts Market)

"We have been continuously working on ways in which we may be able to interpolate the principles of Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) here at the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries (NICAI). We are very excited by the potential of IE and greatly challenged to find an appropriate interpretation for our context. - We anticipate that students will be setting their own agendas and pathways of study by asking questions such as: "What do I need to know; who can I study with, and work with, to find out what I need to know; how can I apply this knowledge; and on whose behalf?" - These questions arise from the educational philosophy known as 'Intellectual Entrepreneurship' (or IE), developed at the University of Texas, Austin, under the leadership of Richard Cherwitz. IE aims to shift the model of learning and teaching from 'apprenticeship-certification- entitlement' to one of 'discovery-ownership-accountability'. Students come to accept responsibility not only for what and how they learn, but are also accountable to the community for how they apply that learning. IE students are encouraged to act as 'citizen scholars' and 'social entrepreneurs' with their intellectual capital leveraging knowledge for social good. . . In tandem with this IE initiative, NICAI is also working on change to graduate profiles. Through links with industry, we anticipate advances in industry-led teaching, with greater emphasis on generic capabilities, student internships in industry, entrepreneurial skills, and more professional learning outcomes, all of which will contribute to 'pedagogy for employability'. (Sharman Pretty, "Designing Context - A View from the Edge")

The simple answer is to say that Rothwell is a maddening writer who makes every effort to bend the world to his will and the reader along with it, so that the effort to resist him partakes of that derangement. He is, to adapt Falstaff, not only mad in himself but a cause that madness should be in others. - Of course, putting it like this is unfair to Rothwell, whose work is as moving and eloquent and imaginative (and as willing to stare down the truth no matter what mesmerising abyss it lurks in) as contemporary writing can be. But he is at the same time at an edge of artifice and distinctiveness where a lot of wise heads and smart money are liable to reject him. What was it that Dr Johnson said of Milton? That, as Ben Jonson had earlier said of Spenser, he writ no language, that he wrote a Babylonish dialect? And wasn't it Joseph Conrad, himself a latter-day Homer of the sea, who said of that most Miltonic of prose epics, Moby Dick, that it didn't have a single line of sincerity in it? - This is the hyperbole of the anti-hyperbolic. . . Rothwell is a remarkable writer and he has the exorbitant pretentiousness that goes with everything that is exquisite and mandarin and expectant about his whole endeavour. - Whether he's waiting for God or Godot in the desert doesn't matter, or only to him. His Northern Territory is a kind of junkyard of the detritus of a formidable if decadent European cultivation, but who could object, that's how Dostoyevsky saw the West and its gaming tables: with cold, engrossed eyes. (Peter Craven, "Appointment with the sublime", Australian Literary Review, The Australian)

Ah, dear old London, with your million deep-fried chicken shops, your "traffic calming", your excellent jackets and scarves, your bleak council blocks called Mandeville Close and your scowling, enduring populace. London, with your buildings black with grime and your unlovely rubbish strewn everywhere; your pockets of wild woodland in the suburbs and spires rising beyond grassy heaths. Yout sad-faced men; your relentless architecture of cream-piping terraces or terse Georgian facades for thousands and thousands of kilometres of streets; your bricks in a dozen hues of baby-cack brown; and your discount shopes jostling awkwardly in the ground floors of 200-year-old houses. Your august street names resonant of the Monopoly board and a hundred historical novels. Your riot of a peak hour in the Underground and your doughty buses. Your wonderful pubs and your awful Chinese takeaway. Your coltish maidens, your mulish old women, your cheery blokes, your oiks with slack mouths and one eye higher than the other. The way you make me inexplicably call older men "sir" here. The way people say, "Yer orright?" to each other in passing. The pockets of cosiness and pointy bits of charm. The sheer crammed, uncomfortable, elbows-in fullness of it. . . This is a town with 7 1/2 million people and a street layout from the Dark Ages. I wonder if Melbourne, much younger and more springy, has the same comprehension, the same understanding of past and therefore future needs. (Kate Holden, "Our streets paved with pigeon poo, the future takes wing" The Age)

"We wanted something that in a sense would be a finishing school for people who have a very good undergraduate qualification and are now wanting that kind of capstone degree that gives them depth and an entry to the more cross-cutting skills," Considine says. The EMA [Executive Masters of Arts] is part of the university's rollout of its Melbourne model, which focuses on professional and specialist graduate schools while providing generalist undergraduate degrees. . . Considine conceives the course as being a master of the liberal arts that will showcase the strength of the humanities. While there is strong backing for the course from the faculty, when he engaged consultants to test-drive the idea with employers and prospective students, the feedback was dismissive. People were unimpressed with the fluffy name, but from that came the idea to add a strong professional, or vocational, component and harden up the name. In some ways the EMA has taken ideas from the MBA in that it will have an emphasis on a strong cohort experience and networking. ("Arts master gets down to business". Andrew Trounson interviews Melbourne University Dean of Arts, Mark Considine. Weekend Australian)

This is Melbourne's fourth such festival, described as a cultural celebration of "light, hope and enlightenment," in which an array of artists gather at the square to poke coloured holes in the long, dark nights. . . Ever since we crawled out of the primordial soup, man has been fascinated by light and has gone to great lengths to replicate it. In Ireland, the prehistoric mound of Newgrange was built with utter precision to capture the sun from the winter equinox; in Egypt, the temple at Abu Simbel is a similar ingenious collaboration of science and architecture. From the first naked light bulb came the fairy lights, the floodlights at sporting events, lights in cars, stick-on wall lights, night-lights and flourescent wands. But light is so much more than watts and matches. We are all looking for a way out of the dark. . . . So where does that leave [Mexican artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's] Solar Equation? Operated by mathematical formulas but visually a metaphor for so much more. As it hovers above the square, 7 1/2 billion times closer to us that its prototype, it looks almost apocryphal, as if it has just tumbled out of a William Blake painting. The fact that today is World Environment Day adds resonance; we are at the mercy of this great big burning ball. Without it, we are nothing. (Kathy Evans, "A little enlightening relief" The Age)

Distraction draws on the lives and ideas of a surprising and illuminating collection of philosophers, writers and artists – from Plato to Matisse, from Seneca to Machiavelli, from Nietzsche to T.S. Eliot. ‘They are not heroes,’ says Young, ‘they are my peers. They are people who I talk to like to my friends. What I do with their advice is my business but I will certainly ask for it. In writing this book I have wanted to meet them. I have wanted to say to Seneca, “Dear Seneca, your death is an inspiration!”. I wanted to say to Ovid, “your poems have survived!” I wanted to say to all of them, “All this time later, we remember you!”’ (Maria Tumarkin interviews Damon Young)

Thankfully, however, all is not lost. Although the culture of traditional NSW pubs is inexorably dying in Sydney, numerous examples of this magnificent genre still exist elsewhere in the premier state. One need only travel two hours north from Sin City to Newcastle and the Hunter Valley to see that, thankfully, there is still somewhere in NSW that is keeping the dream alive. - While visiting this part of the world around 12 months ago I was inspired to see just how many old-style pubs it still had, and how many old-style blue-collar drinkers continue to exist in their unspoilt natural habitat. A day spent pub crawling around the Hunter Valley, immersing oneself in the simple pleasures of establishments such as the Boatrowers Hotel of Stockton, the Grand Junction of Maitland and the mighty Cessnock Hotel is an experience that truly rekindles one's faith in Australian culture. While Sydney continues to be redeveloped, desecrated and spivified, at least the heart of real Australia continues to beat strongly somewhere else. (Ben Davies, "The death of Sydney pubs", The Spectator)

Karl Kraus: Of The Artist

The signs of true artistry – to fashion for oneself a problem out of what is taken for granted and thereby solve the problems of others; to make good their ignorance with one’s own knowledge and doubt oneself down into the depths of hell; to put a question to a servant and give the answer to a master.

Why does the public behave so hatefully towards literature? Because it has a command of language. People would venture forth against the other arts in the same way if singing to each other were as good a means of communicating, or smearing each other with paint or spattering each other with plaster. The unfortunate thing is that Literary Art works with material the rabble handles on a daily basis. This is why literature is beyond help. The public claims for itself the verbal material of literature all the more impudently the further literature distances itself from general comprehensibility. The best thing would be to keep literature a secret from the public until a law came into existence which banned everyday language altogether, or perhaps allowed the general public the use of sign-language in case of emergencies. Before such a law sees the light of day however, it is to be hoped they might have learnt to respond to the famous aria “How’s business, mate?” with a still-life.

Journalism, which has driven the true writers into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of their pastures. The hacks would like to be authors in their own right. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material that he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach. In its hands eternity itself becomes topical, though it just as easily becomes an anachronism too. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. Let it age confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.

Creative men can afford to shut out the impression of others' creativity. Which is why they often turn their backs on the world, even though they regularly perceive its imperfections.

That which has its living element in the material dies before the material. That which has its living element in language lives as long as the language.

The thoughtless man thinks that one only has a thought by having it and clothing it with words. He fails to comprehend that one actually only has it when one has words into which the thought grows.

The sense [Der Sinn (masc)] took hold of the form [die Form (fem)], there was a struggle and she succumbed. A thought was given birth to which had the traits of both.

Language is the mother not the maid of thought.

A reader is incapable of surmising from the mere spoken or written thought that its form existed prior to the material it gives form to, nor should he. But one can show him that it was so by trying to raise up a thought that has slipped below the threshold of consciousness. To produce free associations, as distantly connected as you like from the material of the thought, will be a vain exercise. It simply doesn’t help that the man who has the thought and the other he is trying to induce to see it draw closer to one another by material groping. For instance the thought that one “can’t see the wood for the trees” would never be flushed up by a chance sighting of a wood, nor by that of the trees that veil the wood from sight. It might well present itself though on the path via which it first came into being. Try repeating the tone of voice or the gesture with which one said it to oneself, soon enough a certain something that in some way expresses missing the point or parts instead of wholes will start to shimmer before you and – there you have it, you see the wood that you couldn’t see for the trees. To think in the medium of language means coming into superfluity via superficiality. As last night’s dream comes back to you when you brush a hand against the bed-sheets.

Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.

I fasten onto the thought by the word and it comes to me.

How many thoughts do I have that failed to occur to me and that I couldn’t fix with particular words, but that I whipped up out of language as a whole.

The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together into the thought.

There are people who imitate originality before the fact. When two people have a thought, it doesn’t belong to the one who had it first but to the one who had it better.

In art too the poor man isn't allowed to take anything from the rich man, though the rich man may take everything from the poor man.

Mr. M was reprimanded for having put an ugly sentence to paper. And rightly so. For it came to light that the sentence was actually one of Jean Paul’s and a good one.

If a thought can successfully live in two different forms, it doesn’t have it anywhere near as good as two thoughts that live in a single form.

Art has to be content with itself in an age that knows itself superior to eternity.

The journalist is actually turned on by deadlines. He writes worse when he has time at his disposal.

Heinrich Heine got so far undoing the blouse of the German language that nowadays all the louts can go the grope on her.

The imitator is often better than the innovator.

The book page men plunder Nature’s household in order to dress up their moods. When they write about blowing their noses it comes out sounding like rolling thunder – otherwise, who’d understand what they meant? “That’s just like when …” they say, thinking they do the cosmos a great honour letting the events of the natural world trot alongside their stupendous sentiments and checking if Nature measures up. This is what they call using similes or making comparisons. In fact the most they succeed in doing is every so often shedding light on the means of comparison with the aid of the object of comparison. At any rate it’s a matter of being cultured. The you know what something’s like when it’s like something else. When Heine is full of yearning, that’s like when a fir tree – hopefully there’s a fir tree there which can play along … Let me say once and for all – a poet’s most elementary experiences are something which take place in the depths of his soul and what occurs within occurs in the world outside him as well - in this unique moment of congruity there is no disparity between the image and its meaning, no separation between illustration and text. Shakespeare’s experience of the ingratitude of daughters is born with the image of that ingratitude – the hedge-sparrow feeds the cuckoo so long that it has its head bit off by its young. Heine would first have to discover the meaning of the motif of ingratitude in Nature so that Nature’s way of proceeding could then be compared with the given human situation. The book page men drag themselves into the wider world in order to be able to express themselves in the first place; once they’ve reduced something noble to their own level they discover that it’s actually similar to themselves; once they’ve decked themselves out in others’ finery they recognise themselves. The poet is already a part of Nature; if he is to give expression to Nature, it will be in accordance with her will. Poetry does not depend any sort of fortunate fact involving fir trees having dreams. It is not the egotistical pretension that Nature beholds the poet and is there to do his bidding. On the contrary it is founded on mutual understanding which brings tears to the eyes of the poet too. The facile notion that something apt follows from every movement of the soul has seduced the German ear and brought unspeakable misery upon art! Art has been made a means of killing time and thereby kills off eternity itself. Nature wears a pleasing aspect because we find in her the pretty things that our favourite writers have crammed into her by uttering the words: That’s as if . . . They have snipped life down into a series of ornaments which now decorate our nullity. The fir tree no longer sprouts fresh green needles but has dreams. Oh, it’s much more poetic that way, as well as testifying to the yearning of the poet, which we'd otherwise still need to see some evidence of. Nowadays the poet says quite simply: If the fir tree felt as I did, then I’d feel like the fir tree, viz. dreamy.

Let me warn you about reprints. The living element of what I write is my writing: reproduce it and it will suffocate. For everything depends on the air a phrase breathes and in bad air even a phrase of Shakespeare’s is guaranteed to croak.

A curse upon journalism, it has the Midas touch in reverse; every foreign thought it comes into contact it with it transforms into an opinion! How is one to reclaim stolen gold when the thief manifestly only has a bit of miserable small change in his pocket?

Opinions are of no consequence to art, she sends them on to the journos to use as they see fit and is in danger precisely when the journos declare her to be in the right.

I don’t have any deep reason for disliking novels, for it seems apt to me that something that doesn’t interest me is said in a roundabout way.

They place in his way the obstacles he wanted to free them from.

Varieté. Slap-stick is the only brand of humour with a Weltanschauung nowadays. Because there's a deeper reason to it, it appears to be as much without rhyme or reason as the situations it sets before us. The laughter it provokes in our region of the earth is indeed without rhyme or reason. A human being who suddenly gets down on all fours makes for a primitive contrast which the simplest minds will find irresistible. A scene in which an MC in tails falls to the floor like a sack presupposes somewhat more sophisticated powers of comprehension. What could it be but the ad absurdum of dignity, of the sense of formality, of a thoroughly decorative mode of life? Middle European culture supplies one with all the prerequisites needed to understand this type of humour. The humour of clowning cannot take root here. Between the two there can be no comparison. When two clowns jump up and down on each others’ stomachs the only thing that tickles us is when they suddenly swap spots, the comedy of the unforseen agony. American humour on the other hand is the ad absurdum of the life of man become machine. The action takes place without anything getting in the way, making it plausible for a man to fly into the room via the window only then to be thrown out the door – which he takes with him under his arm as he goes. Life gets tremendously simplified. Because comfort is the highest principle of all, it goes without saying that you can get yourself a beer by using a human being as a beer tap and holding a glass underneath any one of his outlets. People bash each others’ skulls with hatchets and tenderly enquire – did you notice anything? Machines carry out a continuous slaughter, but without shedding a drop of blood. Why all the violence? It's a test of the strength of our comfortable ways. One presses a button and the servant boy cops it in the neck. If something’s a nuisance it is wiped out of existence. Wooden beams bend at will, everything goes swimmingly, there are no idle hands. But then a slip of paper won’t do what it’s told. It refuses to lie there where one has put it for comfort’s sake, it drifts up into the air again and again. How irritating. One sees oneself forced to give it a thumping with a hammer. It’s still twitching. One gets ready to shoot it maybe, one blows it up with dynamite. An outrageous piece of machinery is produced in order to calm the slip of paper down. Life has become terribly complicated. In the end everything goes bottom up because something or other doesn’t want to fit into the system . . . maybe a scrap of sentimentality that a fraud has brought over from Europe.

Karl Kraus By Night

The views of the author of Karl Kraus' aphorisms about sex, art or any other matter are categorically not the views of The Great Stage, though they are related hypothetically to the views of The Great Stage. . .

"The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up."

"Life is a struggle that would be worthy of a better cause."

"That which is brought against me as an objection is often one of my premisses. For instance the notion that my polemic tears at life's heart."

"Diagnosis is one of the most widespread diseases."

"The aesthetes had divided things among themselves. Dr. Arthur got death, Richard got life, Hugo got the Church of Holy Devotion together with the evening sky, Poldi got the entire collection of the Ambraser Gallery and Felix got all that together and lots more plus the Renaissance."

From: By Night (1919)

Eros

Woman is dazzled by gesture; man has esteem for content. Since neither type exists any more, I have to rely on that pitiful mish-mash that's ended up in pants and capers round me lustily in love and in hate. I'm forever having to withdraw nine tenths of my respect to get to a useful remainder. How little humanity remains in the world, when femininity has evaporated.

Art

That thought is not clothed by language, but something that grows into language, is something the modest creator will never bring the shameless tailors to believe.

I have only mastered the language of others. My own language does with me what it will.

There’s no language it’s so difficult to make oneself understood in as language.

A professor of literature said he thought my aphorisms were nothing more than mechanical inversions of conventional idioms. That’s actually quite right. If only he hadn’t failed to grasp the thought that is the driving force of the mechanism – that more comes of the mechanical inversion of conventional idioms than of their mechanical repetition. Did you know that is the very Secret of Today? It’s something you have to have lived through. Not to mention the fact that a conventional idiom still has more going for it than a professor of literature, whom you get nothing out of if you leave him to repeat himself and just as little out of if you mechanically invert him.

He alone is an artist who can make a riddle out of any solution.

Art which doesn’t speak against the contemporary world seems to me to be art which will be lucky to last till tomorrow. Art sends the times into retreat and is thus the opposite of a way of passing time. The true enemy of the times is the living power left in language, which is in direct communication with the world of spirit - the world of spirit which the times have roused to indignation. That conspiracy between language and spirit known as art may well arise under these conditions. The sense of universal ease which takes from language whatever it needs is something the times indulge; true art by contrast can only come from an act of refusal. From an outcry against the times, not appeasement of them. When called on as a consolation, true art departs the deathbed of mankind with a curse. It attains to perfection by way of disillusionment not self-satisfaction.

Time


The true miracle of technology – that it faithfully sets about wrecking everything it’s a compensation for.

What the papers have printed on any single day of the last 50 years has had more power to damage culture than the complete works of Goethe had to help culture.

If I only have a mobile, won’t I be able to find a forest to walk in when I want?! The only reason you can’t live without a mobile is because mobiles exist. Without forests you’ll never be able to live – even when the forests have ceased to exist long ago. The same applies to humanity as a whole. He who has put all its ideals behind him simply becomes a slave to its needs and will find a substitute for forests sooner than for mobiles. Human imagination has found a surrogate for itself in technology; technology is a surrogate for which there’s no surrogate. Those who carry within them no forests of the imagination but do have the inner being of mobiles will grow poorer when there are no forests left in the external world. The forests have ceased to exist because people have the inner being of mobiles as well as having them attached to their heads half the time in the external world. The logic of it is this: technology is connected with the world of spirit in such a way that an emptiness arises because the new gadgets exist and a vacuum if they're not at hand. What comes to pass within the temporal realm is the most indispensible form of nothingness.

1915

The development of European life took such a turn that religion could get no further: at which point the press turned up on the scene and brought everything to an end. Verily, journalism got closer to the frailties of human nature in order to flatter them than religion had in order to offer them help. In short, journalism can do more to harm human beings than religion can do human beings good. How great that personality would have to be which was capable of remaining itself amid the workings of this powerful means of control - an editor responsible to the whole of humanity! And how strong humanity would have to be to give itself up entirely to his responsibility! Yet this means of control is the means of subsistence for a horde of ethical imbeciles, it is what the frail of spirit could not get by without. The Word that was in the beginning they no longer hear. And so an anti-Christian humanity awaits a New Word - from the Centres of Power and Control.

Between language and war there is the following rough connection: the existence of language that has hardened into cliché also explains the general readiness to trade in substance for a surrogate diction, to confidently find unobjectionable about oneself everything that suffices as a reproach to the next man, just as it explains the rush to indignantly unmask what one rather likes doing oneself, tangle up every doubt in a thicket of bad verbiage and casually brush off every suspicion that things are not in order as if it were a naked act of aggression. These are the prime qualities of a language that today resembles nothing so much as a finished product, the life-goal of whose speakers is to shove it under the nose of the right buyer, a language that shines like a saint’s halo but has the plain soul of the average man – the little man who wouldn’t have time to do anything wrong because he swings to and fro between home and office and when that isn’t enough displays his motives for all to see.

Everything that happens, happens for the sake of those who describe it and those who have no experience of it. An enemy spy being led to the gallows has to go the long way round, so that movie-goers have something really interesting to watch; he’s made to gawp again and again into the camera so that the same movie-goers get the facial expression they’re happy with. We keep our peace. We who lived through it do not describe it. The way of thought that leads to the gallows of mankind is a dark one, I had no desire to travel it as the condemned spy of mankind. Yet I must. And I show mankind my face. For the experience which troubles my heart is a horror of the vacuum represented by those technical devices, the minds of men, when confronted by an indescribable superfluity of events.

By Night


Proverbs only come into being when a language is at a stage where silence is still possible.

The hackneyed language of the everyday originates when they have a bit of a fiddle with Language; when they evade Language like the law, or like an enemy; when they answer questions they’ve not been asked with a thousand circumlocutions. I don’t want to share the company of such language; I want to go the long way round it, it, you, whatever you are, that goes round in my head like a wheel; and at night stalks about like the living dead.

Ornaments and flowers of speech are the favourite dress of an age which has forgotten the sense of such expressive forms; they become all the more favoured the further the age outgrows them, the further, that is, the age’s very substance renders it incapable of creating new ornaments and flowers of speech; and it is thus that the state will “draw its sword”, long after it got used to drawing the pin on the poison gas grenades. Can you imagine something like that ever becoming idiomatic?
Technology can create no new idioms, yet it leaves the spirit of mankind in a position where it is unable to do without its old idioms – now that should give you an idea what technology’s all about. The confusion created when a changed mode of existence drags along past forms of life – this is the very element in which the evil of the world lives and grows. The age does not give shape to idioms, it goes pear-shaped feeding on too many; thus it is that it draws its sword time and again, because it is in incurable conflict with itself. A new turn of events will bring forth no new expressive forms, but to be sure the old forms will bring forth events.

“Conquer the world market.” Because businessmen said it, men of war got busy doing it. In the meantime there’s been quite a lot of conquest, though clearly not of the world market.

(Trans. CS)

Glimpsing Evil - Spiegel Interview with Heidi Kastner

For those of you who, like yours truly, feel consistently underinformed by what passes for journalism in Australia, here's something else from overseas. Crime coverage in this country veers towards two opposite, unpromising extremes, the glum circumlocutions of "mental health professionals" and the trashy metaphysics of the Herald Sun, according to which what there BASICALLY IS in the world are paedophiles lurking behind the rosebushes of childhood.

The subject of the following interview from Germany's Der Spiegel, Heidi Kastner, is more than moderately refreshing dealing with sex and violence within the family - a subject which stinks not just on account of the ugly deeds it involves, but equally because of the mainstream media's unblinking instrumentalisation of it. To go by her Spiegel interview, Kastner has a mind of her own - a preparedness to take it up to her interviewer, an awareness of the limitations of her knowledge and an ability to theorise realistically in public about atrocious acts committed within families - in a way that neither absolves abusers nor fudges the mixed feelings of victims. When was the last time you heard an Australian forensic expert ask "Do you have to give in to people's every voyeuristic twinge?" when confronted with one of 7, 9 or 10's self-righteous agents of provocation? Not that the Spiegel fares as badly as all that - where need be it challenges the expert to justify the very form in which she presents her sensation-saturated material.

The result is media-conscious media coverage - an interviewer and an interviewee who make each other mutually aware of the danger of overspicing the soup in every representation of their unpleasant topic - who, moreover, seem to accept that families are sites of inter- and intra-psychic stress and strain and of the total commercialisation of society - in part by means of the very media that provide them with the means to communicate. CS

***

Kastner, 47, become known as an expert witness in the case of Joseph Fritzl. The culprit in the so-called incest-drama of Amstetten was sentenced in March this year to life imprisonment. For Kastner, the Friztl case is just one of many in which she has dealt with violence committed by fathers within their own families.

Spiegel: Ms. Kastner, you write about terrible acts of extreme violence against children. Who would voluntarily read something like that?

Kastner: I don’t know. I’m confronted with these cases regularly. Maybe in the meantime I’ve lost a sense of how it affects others. If you work in garbage disposal, at some point you don't get worked up about the smell of toilet buckets any more.
Spiegel: The book teems with psychopaths, human beings running amok and other insane cases. Don't you overspice the soup a little?
Kastner: I present the really tough cases of paternal abuse - that's true. But I'm a forensic psychiatrist and I've been working in the field for twelve years. Someone who gives their child a clip over the ears on public transport is not going to land in my office.
Spiegel: What interests you about the cruelty of fathers?
Kastner: For me above all it's about the motivation of the culprits. Hardly any light has been thrown on it - for example, in the case of so-called family tragedies, where a man obliterates wife and child. In preparing this book I found three studies in total and one of them came from Fiji.
Spiegel: What have you discovered?
Kastner: As I looked more closely at the cases, it became clear that one thing was the same for all the men who run amok in their families - their lives had reached tipping point on two levels. They had been left by their partners and at the same time lost their jobs or were in major financial trouble.
Spiegel: That can happen to women too.
Kastner: Sure, though there we're dealing more with mothers who are so depressive that they take their children with them when the take their own lives. In almost none of the cases involving men that I've come across is there a depressive illness lurking in the background. They're more likely to be suffering from wounded narcissism.

Journalism, or: Philosophy Dives Screeching from the Page

The definition of journalism - a verbal = X that opinionates in the absence of world-views; that proliferates in a world and time in which philosophies have become so much meal in the mouths of salesmen, lobbyists, hobbyists and hagiographers. In the world of journalism the editor is the gladiator. The writer, except in the case that he became a journalist, is his quarry. Writing itself is replaceable, for the sole necessity is that something be said and what I have written – can be written again – by someone else. The editor is a man with opinions. He is the taskmaster of the opinions, the man who ensures that they are truly opinions about what they ought to be about: opinions. By his agency opinions are made to interlock. He spreads them out before us like a fan with an untold number of facets. With their help a cool breeze wafts over our sultry lives - it's another question whether it’s just editorial ugliness, or truth as well, that screens itself from us here. In the process our dull yoke of factuality is not thrown off, but our labour under it is made easier by the refreshing mix of bad puns and righteous indignation. If true opinions, philosophies, existed here, they would dive screeching in terror from the page. But rest assured this cannot happen. That incendiary form of existence known as human action - which real opinions further and genuine philosophies supply the living atmosphere for - is here amended and annulled.

February 7, 2010

Gilles Bouche: Copenhagen - What Could Have Been

The following text is a translated and slightly adapted version of the second part of a two-part piece which I wrote while the Copenhagen climate change conference was taking place and which was published on the website of Forum magazine – the magazine which, very roughly and mutatis mutandis, comes closest to being Luxembourg's  Monthly. It was born of a feeling of frustration with much of the media coverage of the conference – including the coverage by said magazine. What frustrated me was what seemed to me an absence of analysis, a failure to understand or even make an effort to understand the science and politics of climate change, a fortiori a failure to help or even make an effort to help the reader to such an understanding, hence a failure to fulfil what seemed to me one of the main functions of journalism taking climate change as its topic – the function of continuously working at closing the gap between scientists and nonscientists, politicians and nonpoliticians, experts and non-experts. What frustrated me was what seemed to me a failure of journalists to do their job as mature and rational people should want to do their job and to treat their readers as mature and rational people should want to be treated.

Journalists indeed tried to close a gap, but not the one between experts and nonexperts. They tried to close the gap between nonexperts present and nonexperts absent. Instead of informing, they entertained. They tried to capture the atmosphere of the conference, they tried to give us a sense of what it was like to be there, of what it would have been like to be there, of what we were missing out on by not being there. The conference as experience, the conference as spectacle. Instead of cutting through the confusion, journalists were happy to express their inability to do so as the truth about the conference, as what was to be experienced at the conference.

A telling anecdote: Well toward the end of the conference, a journalist blogging for New Matilda, one of the better magazines, found the time to ask a scientist what he was thinking about the 1.5 degree C guardrail, the target advocated by many developing countries. The scientist bluntly said that meeting this target was virtually impossible. The current atmospheric composition, without any further increase in atmospheric CO2, is already bound to lead to a global temperature increase of 1.3 degree C. This answer clearly left the journalist flabbergasted, which he would not have been, had he cared to have a glance at the literature.

The question which I tried to answer tentatively in the article was: How can one assess whether an agreement reached in Copenhagen is a good agreement? What criteria should an agreement meet? I considered two criteria: what I called “adequacy” and “fairness”. Talking about adequacy is fairly straightforward. One mainly has to listen to what scientists have to say. The science constrains the choice of an adequate target (such as the 2 degree C and the 1.5 degree C guardrails) and determines the choice of the means (in form of a CO2 emissions budget and CO2 emissions reductions) necessary to meet the target. Talking about fairness is more difficult, for obvious reasons. It presupposes a some conception of ethics, and ethics is a mess.

In the article, I mostly confined myself to relating the position of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), which advises the German government, as laid out in its excellent special report Solving the Climate Dilemma: The Budget Approach. The WBGU recommends a principle-based attitude to fairness and identifies three main principles: the principle of equity, the principle of financial capacity, and the principle of mitigation capacity. The basic idea behind a principle-based approach to the distribution of emissions rights is of course that emissions rights should be distributed according to certain principles, but also that divergences from the distribution thus obtained are admissible, but should be justified, notably by invoking further principles. The advantage of a principle-based approach is hence that one starts with simplicity and introduces complexity step by step. Though of course, I do not think that the same issues cannot be approached from many different angles.

Finally, I refer to, resp. recommend, the following literature:

McKinsey & Company, An Australian Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction (February 2008).

http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/pdf/Australian_Cost_Curve_for_GHG_Reduction.pdf

PIK et al, RECIPE: The Economics of Decarbonization (2009). http://www.pik-potsdam.de/research/research-domains/sustainable-solutions/research-act-intl-climate-pol/recipe-groupspace/working-papers/public-working-papers-from-the-recipe-project/?searchterm=recipe

WBGU, Solving the Climate Dilemma: The Budget Approach (July 2009). http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_sn2009_en.pdf

WBGU, The Minimal Compromise in Copenhagen: A Target – But Still No Plan of Action, (20 December 2009). http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_presse_09_05e.html

***

What are the hallmarks of a good agreement? (Trans. CS)

In part 1 of this post I suggested that an agreement in Copenhagen can be assessed on at least three general criteria: according to appropriateness, fairness and effectivenss. Whether an agreement is appropriate depends firstly on whether the chosen target and secondly on whether the chosen means are appropriate.

Appropriateness

There is an important asymmetry between overall targets and the means of achieving them. The choice of target is constrained by scientific facts, though it is not completely determined by them. It is and remains a political decision, reflecting a value-judgment (which doesn’t mean that we can’t rationally or critically discuss said value-judgment). Scientists only make pronouncements about the conditions for reaching a given target and what the consequences of the target are, i.e. what leads to the target being reached and where the target itself leads in its turn. The choice of target itself is the business of political decision-makers.

Two targets have been going the round in Copenhagen, both expressed in terms of an upper limit on global temperature increase relative to preindustrial times. The EU and the G8 among others are advocating the adoption of a 2 degree C guardrail, originally recommended by the WBGU (German Advisory Council on Climate Change) in 1995. The Alliance of Small Island States, whose very existence is threatened even in the unfortunately optimistic scenario of a 2 degree C temperature increase, insist on the adoption of a more stringent upper limit of 1.5 degree C. They enjoy the support of many developing countries and indigenous peoples.

Either target will be difficult to meet. To this day, global temperature has already increased by 0.8 degree C relative to preindustrial times. The current atmospheric composition is set to lead to a global temperature increase of 1.3 degree C over the next decades - an increase of 2.4 degree C if the cooling effect of short-lived polluting particles - the so-called global dimming - is discounted.

While science constrains, but does not determine the choice of target, the choice of means (at a general level which doesn’t exclude differing transpositions to less general levels) is completely determined by science relative to a politically determined target. Hence scientists at the WBGU tell us that, IF we are to have a 67% chance of remaining within the 2 degree temperature barrier, we will have to remain within a global CO2 budget of 750Gt for the period 2010 – 2050, with very low emissions or even negative emissions after 2050. In 2050 annual global per capita emissions should average 1t. If you commit yourself to the target but not the means, you either hold a different scientific view (which of course has to be scientifically based if it’s to be genuinely scientific), or you’re being straightforwardly irrational.

In all probability no global CO2 budget will be settled on at Copenhagen. Instead, reference will likely be made to the recommendations of the fourth IPCC report and commitments to national reduction targets. So to assess whether an agreement is appropriate given the picture provided by the WBGU you have to do a few calculations and derive a commitment to a global budget from commitments to national reduction targets. However, deriving a commitment to an exact global budget is impossible because of the way national reduction targets are currently formulated.

National Reduction Targets

At least three kinds of target are in current use: Annex I countries such as the US and the EU (the latter of course acting as a unified bloc) formulate reduction targets in the form of percentage reductions of annual emissions volumes over specified time-periods, in the case of the EU over the periods 1990 – 2020 and 1990 – 2050. Most non-Annex I countries with reduction targets on the table formulate these in the form of percentage reductions of annual emissions volumes relative to a Business As Usual projection within a specified timeframe. Many non-Annex I countries, e.g. China and India, formulate reduction targets in the form of percentage reductions in the CO2 intensity of national economic production, i.e. reductions of emissions volumes divided by GDP, again within a specified timeframe.

The way Annex I countries formulate their reduction targets already makes deriving a precise global CO2 budget impossible. To do so you would need a precise emissions trajectory. Stipulating a lowering of emissions by 30% by 2020 relative to 1990 restricts but doesn’t determine the emissions trajectory within the relevant timeframe. It would be theoretically possible to meet the target by doing nothing until 2019 and then suddenly lowering emissions by 30% in the final year. This would result in an emissions trajectory corresponding over the entire timeframe to emissions volumes far higher than for a scenario involving continuous reductions. In general it’s the case that the earlier reductions are undertaken, the lower the volume of emissions.

Clearly other additional factors make deriving an exact CO2 budget impossible, e.g. the fact that many non-Annex I countries don’t have to put any emissions targets on the table at all - understandably so, in the context of the Kyoto Agreement.

Fairness

Comparisons between the reduction targets of different Annex I countries – which is to say comparisons between reduction targets formulated on the same model – are already quite complicated. Assume we want to compare the targets of the US and the EU. The EU has put a 20 – 30% emissions reduction on the table for the period 1990 – 2020. The US has put a 17% emissions reduction on the table for the period 2005 – 2020. To compare the two targets, the thing to do is to calculate them relative to the same timeframe. Which timeframe do we choose though? If we take 1990 – 2020, we get a reduction target for the US of – 3%. If we take 2005 – 2020, we get a reduction target for the EU of 13 – 24%. This means: if we take 1990 as a base-year, the American target looks very modest indeed, something that the European media gladly points to time and again, as if the American preference for a different base-year involved the USA in a simple sleight-of-hand. They nearly had us fooled! If you take 2005 as a base-year, then the future efforts the US and the EU have indicated they are ready to impose on themselves seem to be roughly in the same ballpark. This still doesn’t mean that the burden of effort is fairly distributed. Shouldn’t the EU be rewarded for past efforts?

It gets even more complicated though. Reduction targets thus specified only relate to national emissions totals, not national per capita emissions. If, on the other hand, you look at per capita emissions over the period 1990 – 2020, then it turns out that the EU is putting forward a reduction of 24 – 33%, the US a reduction of 29%. The two targets are in the same ballpark. If you take per capita emissions over the period 2005 – 2020, then the EU reduction target of 14 – 25% contrasts with a far more ambitious American target of 27%. The game has changed. And the reason for that is clear: population is rising in the US (as it is in Canada and Australia) and is stagnating in the EU.

This, however, doesn’t mean that the US is in better stead ethically or environmentally than the EU. (At most, it means that the EU could take on a little more, maybe also that the Europeans need to get down off their high horse.) What’s important of course is not just percentage reductions of per capita emissions, but above all absolute per capita emissions; on that front the American numbers (20 tonnes per capita per annum) are well above European numbers (9 tonnes p.c p.a). The EU is again in a bit better stead.

The calculations get more complicated again when financial capacity and mitigation capacity are brought into the equation. Per capita GDP in the US is about twice as high as in the EU (since the latter’s eastward expansion) – which might lead you to think the US was capable of achieving greater reductions. (Mind you, you’d have to take into account other economic factors as well such as national indebtedness.) On the other hand, it could be claimed for example that the US (along with Canada and Australia) have fewer opportunities for mitigation in the transport sector because of longer-distance transport needs. See how complex the issue gets.

As a provisional conclusion we can state that the unsystematic way national emissions reduction targets are formulated makes evaluating an agreement according to the criteria of appropriateness and above all fairness a difficult business. Couldn’t we do all this better? Couldn’t we use a very simple algorithm to derive national reduction targets (in the form of national CO2 budgets) from the global budget? This is precisely what the WBGU suggests in a special report. However, before we turn to the details of the proposal, we need to turn quickly to another question.

Ethics and Cynicism

There is an important asymmetry between the criteria of appropriateness and fairness. It is clear that the criterion of appropriateness will play an effective role in the negotiations in Copenhagen. Many nations might have different views about which goal is appropriate, above all whether 1.5 degrees C or 2 degrees C is an appropriate upper limit. No one though disputes that an agreement needs to be appropriate. Otherwise we plainly wouldn’t need an agreement.

The art of having something to say: Part 4 - Kraus

Seeing that the fifth of the four reader comments that The Great Stage has elicited so far was spoken in praise of the Karl Kraus quote at the top of last month’s big VCA piece, here, mid-week, are some more Kraus translations, with the promise of reams more if someone can find me a publisher:

The aphorism never coves itself with truth, it is either half true, or one-and-a-half times true.

Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.

Why does many a man write? Because he does not possess enough character not to write.

Ethics is running up against the limits of language.

Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.

The world has been defeaned by deadly intonation. It is my conviction that events no longer come to pass, that instead clichés do the entire work of their own accord. Or if events are supposed to come to pass all the same, without being scared off by clichés, then they will cease once the clichés are shattered. The matter is befouled by the language. Our time stinks of its phraseology.

Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper, from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts of our machines.

Where will I find the time not to read so much? . . .

Nationalism – that love which binds me to the numbskulls of my nation, to those that p*ss upon my ways and desecrate my language.

For the first time in the world SHE wants it all and HE wants nothing but her, the gulf between the sexes widens, making room for a whole lot of misery and moralism.

There are metaphors in the language of love too. Those who are illiterate call them perversions and abhor poetry.

Sex can be brought into connection with everything in heaven and earth, with holy religion and sweaty armpits, with the music of the spheres and hurdy-gurdies, with prohibitions and lumpy skin, with the soul and with corsetry. One gives these linkages the name perversions. They have this to be said for them – that they put you in possession of the whole thing when you only have part at your disposal.

The greatest ill in the world is the force impelling one to fritter away one’s inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.

If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.

If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested, nor to a psychoanalyst, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.

The egghead who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without re-stating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered a smartarse.

The report’s distortion of reality is the truly faithful report on reality.

Journalism, which has driven Spirit into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of its pastures. The hack would like to be a full-blown published author. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach; in its hands eternity itself becomes topical; if it weren’t that eternity just as easily becomes an anachronism too if you let a journalist near it. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. It ages confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.

Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.

The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together in the thought.

Woe betide an age in which art doesn’t make the earth less cocksure of itself, in which the artist and not mankind faints before the abyss separating the artist from mankind!

Culture comes to an end when barbarians erupt out of its midst.

The Science and Politics of Global Warming: Actualities and Possibilities

Two Public Lectures – no.’s 11 and 12 in the series “Global Warming: Science and Politics in Troubled Times”

Delivered, Trades Hall, Carlton, June 8 and 15, 2009

***Lecture No.11***
In which are set out more and more far-reaching considerations about modern society’s faith in science. The grim actualities of the relationship between science and politics summarised.
***Lecture No.12***
In which further grim climate change realities are painted in vivid chiaroscuro.
(To be followed shortly by:
***Lecture No.13***
In which the manifold possibilities for change in Australian society’s response to climate change and in the relationship between science and politics are canvassed.)

There were, you’ll remember, to be two parts to the penultimate section of the course dealing with climate change contrarians, the first revolving around the issue of knowledge and authority, the second revolving around the whole issue of faith in science – whether it’s right to say there is an element of quasi-religious faith involved in doing science, whether, as many of the contrarians say, climate science is particularly faith-based and whether the attitude to the deliverances of climate science in society at large is worryingly (pathologically) faith-based. It’s that last aspect of the problem I want to turn to begin with today – whether the attitude to the deliverances of climate science in society at large is worryingly (pathologically) faith-based. It brings us back to the very start of the course, to the man who, I said right at the beginning, sets out the problems of science and politics as they relate to global warming in a wide-ranging and incisive way, John Lanchester. Here he is again, you’ve already heard this and probably you’ve read the article it comes from in the meantime:

“When we come to sum up how we got to this point, there is one other factor to add to the politicisation of science and the reporting of science. It is a deeper, murkier consideration, and it bears on the way our society is in thrall to science and at the same time only partly understands it. Our material culture is based on science in a way so profound that our attitude to it approaches a kind of faith. Arthur C. Clarke said that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This is a remark beloved of sc-fi fans, and endlessly quoted in discussions of what might happen if there were ever to be contact between humans and aliens (or time travel etc.) Its real sting is that it is a description of the world we already inhabit. Electric light and power, and tv, and computers, and fridges, not to mention cars and planes and lasers and CD players and dialysis machines and wireless networking and synthetic materials, are things we take on trust: we don’t know how they work, but we’re happy to benefit from using them. We may have a rough understanding of scientific method, and even a rough Bill Brysonish sense of some of the science involved, but that is about it; our attitude contains significant components of faith and trust and incomprehension, while at the same time we are grateful for the wonders modern science has brought us.

Our faith-based contentment with science has been challenged before, most particularly by the invention of nuclear weapons. But with global warming, science is bringing us catastrophic news, and is doing so, moreover, on the basis of predictions. . . about the future which demand urgent and radical action in the present. It’s not like being told about some scientific breakthrough, waiting a few years, and then having the breakthrough manifest itself in the form of a technology that gradually becomes more useful over time. The issue of global warming is the opposite of that: we are required to act on the basis of the faith in science which is one of the fundamental underpinnings of our society, but the faith has never been made quite so explicit before, and the need to act radically, urgently and expensively on the basis of scientific models is testing that faith to the full and beyond." J. Lanchester, “Warmer, Warmer” London Review of Books, March 22, 2007

There are several very simple points in there which are useful in seeing how contrarians get the wrong end of the stick when talking about global warming as the source of a new religious dogmatism, as well as a point about how the specialised, theory-bound, rarefied world of science relates to the wider social world. The first point is that the attitude you might take towards the content of climate science (or any science) – the amount of faith involved in your attitude to it – will differ markedly depending on whether you’re a climate scientist or not, and probably it will differ depending on whether you’re a scientifically educated or a non-scientifically educated member of the general public. The further you get from the field itself, the greater the element of faith involved. Nor is the faith of the non-scientifically educated members of the general public unwarranted: it’s a consequence of the fact that we live in a scientifically and technologically advanced society which has a certain division of labour, between scientific experts and non-experts. Unless we want to junk the idea of scientifically and technologically advanced society and unless we want to take the trouble to educate everyone to the point where they have a robust scientifically-independent mind of their own, then faith in the deliverances of science is going to be a cultural given. That’s a point that Lanchester is making in this passage and in the article at large. But there’s an equally great point relating particularly to climate science – the point that the faith we as a society are implicitly being asked to show in its deliverances is not something separate from the belief (amounting sometimes to no more than passive acceptance, sometimes to active appreciation) that we manifest in our everyday dealings with the ensembles of equipment. The faith we as a society of non-experts are being implicitly asked to show in the deliverances of climate science is, Lanchester is saying, the darker side of a quite ordinary everyday faith.

Can we get a bit further with this issue of faith in science? Let me at least say something briefly about the issue of faith in science among scientists – the issue of whether scientists themselves, or “the scientific enterprise” as you might loosely call it, requires any noteworthy manifestation of faith. Rather than saying something myself, I let Oreskes, who in a way has been another of the heroes of this course, say something, and I’ll see what I can get out of it:

“No scientific conclusion can ever be proven, and new evidence may lead scientists to change their views, but it is no more a ‘belief’ to say that earth is heating up than to say that continents move, that germs cause disease, that DNA carries hereditary information, and that HIV causes AIDS. You can always find someone, somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions represent our best current understandings and therefore our best basis for reasoned action.” - Oreskes, “How do we know we’re not wrong?"

The first thing she says there may seem rather surprising: “No scientific conclusion can ever be proven.” Isn’t the hallmark of scientific conclusions that they’re proven – you might ask. Or that they’re backed up with rigorous experimental evidence? Perhaps Oreskes would be better off saying “no scientific conclusion can ever be definitively proven.” Let’s take it that that’s what she means. Why can’t scientific conclusions be definitively proven? Because of what she says next – because new evidence could be discovered or new theories developed which put the old theories in the shade or put old evidence in a new broader context. All of you who are versed in the history of science will know that that’s how paradigm shifts in the sciences often occur – by re-contextualising old theories and old evidence. Classically that’s what happened in the twentieth century in the switchover from classical to post-classical physics, from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. The old Newtonian laws weren’t abandoned, abrogated or declared invalid. Instead they were recognised as limit cases of more general laws, applicable to some – a very large number but not all – the phenomena of physical reality.

Why is it important for us that scientific conclusions can’t ever be definitively proven? Because it means that there is an element of something that might, with qualification, be described as faith in science that’s native to the enterprise itself. And it means that the contrarian argument that “climate science is based on quasi-religious faith” contains a grain of truth, unfortunately just not the truth the contrarians think it contains. All science, I’m saying, contains an element of faith, so naturally climate science does too – though it would be putting it far too strongly to say all science is based on faith. The question then becomes what this element of faith is? And answering that question clearly is important or else the contrarians can get away with the argument that the element of faith in operation in climate science because it’s a science like any other is actually a sign that’s it’s a corrupt science or a pseudo-science that’s been hijacked by political agitators who believe religiously that Western Civilisation is evil. (Even more generally, answering the question what the element of faith is is important because without a clear answer Christian naifs the world over are going to be able to argue that, if what they believe on faith is essentially the same as what people believe on a scientific basis, then there’s no difference between taking the Bible literally and taking the facts of Nature literally. (In fact the Christian naifs I’m thinking of usually go further than that. Having purportedly established that the scientific evaluative standpoint is just as faith-based as their own evaluative standpoint, they assert the superiority of what they believe on faith, because their faith-based belief system gives the world a coherent and striking metaphysical and ethical meaning, which other purportedly faith-based belief systems like the sciences can’t generate and which they in general don’t see it as their job to generate.)

I ask the question again: What is this element of faith that becomes manifest in the fact that scientific conclusions can never be definitively proven? A large part of it is the faith that science is usable, precisely faith in science’s application to practical situations in spite of its non-definitive nature – the faith namely that our assessment of the scientific facts is not going to be completely overthrown any time soon and that our assessment says enough about the way the world is in reality to enable us to act in the world.