The best way to think of “Detour,” which shows at BAM on Nov. 16, is as a kind of anti-“Cleopatra.”

The best way to think of the strategy of opening an article with the phrase “The best way to think of x” is as follows. The writer is announcing:

Before committing forefinger to keyboard, I already saw all the ways it is humanly possible to think about this subject, and having surveyed them pitilessly in my phat brain, I am now going to do you the service, dear reader who is not as clever as I, of revealing the best way to think of it. Do not under any circumstances try to think about it in another way. You will just be wasting your time! Just sit back and observe me thinking about it in the best way. Oh, you may applaud, I suppose.

Of course you do not necessarily need to be a genius of pantactical thought, like Anthony Lane, in order to attempt this ploy. Indeed, in theory, it would even be possible for a writer to announce that what he was going to say was the best way to think of his subject even though it was actually the only way to think of the subject that popped into his poor, befuddled head three minutes before deadline.

Liberal use of the best way to think of may thus be heartily commended to all writers who would like to achieve a rarefied level of intellectual pomposity without actually being obliged to think as hard as a pettifoggingly literal reading of the phrase might indicate.

1. Previously in “annoying New Yorker-ese”: Put it to me this way. «

Worst-ever example of Unspeak on X-Factor last [Sunday] night. Cowell in his capacity as producer obviously wanted to keep ratings hit Jedward, so he needed to vote for them to create the deadlock that would lead to a public vote Jedward were bound to win. But in his capacity as “straight-talking” judge, he couldn’t bring himself to say “I vote for Jedward”, an act he has vilified for weeks. So instead he says “I’m letting the public decide.” See? He’s not only betraying his only redeeming characteristic for greed, he’s championing democracy. FUCK THE MAN!²

Evidently passions run high about The X-Factor, which as far as I understand it is some sort of televised karaoke contest judged by shits? But my correspondent’s point generalizes beyond the jurisprudence of reality TV: very often, a politician who declares that he will let the public decide (thereby appealing to the highest imaginable virtue, democracy), is doing so as a way of getting himself off the hook with regard to an uncomfortable decision that he’d rather not make.

Just so, plastic-browed God-discoverer David Cameron promised for a long time that he would hold a referendum on the constitutional changes to the EU, so as to avoid having to tell the BNP wing of his party where to get off, in contrast to the prime minister who, he fulminated, would not let the public decide. Meanwhile, Obama’s ethics czar said earlier this year, of the opening-up of the White House visitor logs: “We did full transparency. We’ll let the public decide who among them is a lobbyist or not.” Eh? Why not tell the public yourself?

If politicians really consider it such a virtue to let the public decide on matters of significance, then they must be of the view that elected representatives are useless except for the purpose of stealing money to buy themselves houses. So we should expect that, shortly, they will all sack themselves and institute an entirely automated system of state decision-making via premium-rate telephone polls. Let me say now that I for one welcome our new mob-rule overlords.

The only thing I didn’t understand about my correspondent’s otherwise devastating observation was the assertion that Simon Cowell has a “redeeming characteristic”. Please?

1. Thanks to Daniel F. «
2. Happily, we need not decide whether this means “Fuck Simon Cowell” or “Fuck The Man, generally”; we may hold the two senses in a delicious equilibrium. «

The US and the UK famously came to grief when they tried too hard, when lacking proof, to be convincing about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Those of us closely involved on the UK side believed we were illustrating a case that was bound to turn out to be true when the final evidence was collected. But it never was; and we had to take the rap for anticipating the facts.

Diplomatic language, of course, is celebrated for its litotes and subtly playful oxymoron,² and here I believe that Greenstock has designed a masterpiece of the genre: anticipating the facts.

At first it looks like a mere exculpatory understatement, on the order of “jumping the gun”: a cover-your-ass euphemism, decorated with self-mocking paradox (things that aren’t true were never “facts”, anticipated or not). Yet the chronology implied in anticipating the facts is of course devastating: to say that the claims of the existence of WMD were anticipating the facts is to say that those claims (of certain knowledge of the weapons’ existence) were made before the facts were known. And so Greenstock is confirming — in the most delicate possible way! — what was already known but bears repeating: that the US and UK lied (about what they knew to be the case versus what they hoped “was bound to turn out to be true”).

In this way, to say that the US and UK governments were anticipating the facts is an even stronger verdict than saying the “facts were being fixed around the policy”. Greenstock’s formulation makes it clear that there were at the time no “facts” of the required sort to be had, let alone to be had and then fixed around the implacable plans for war.

What “facts” are you currrently anticipating, readers?

1. Not yet renamed to Times Literary, though I suppose it is only a matter of time. «
2. The phrase non-paper, also used by Greenstock in his review, is a particularly nice term of art. «

With the knowledge of science we can solve resource limitations,⁴ cure diseases, and make society work happily.

I suppose (disclaimer: I Am Not An Evil Authoritarian Psychopharmacologist) that science could make society work happily by drugging everyone into a state of smiling docility such that they accept their dystopian lives of hopeless slave-labour. But this really would be science fascism in intense and terrifying form!

Possibly such a nightmarish Nazi-drug-overlords-Arbeit-macht-frei scenario is not what the author intended. But then, how exactly can “knowledge of science” by itself “make society work happily”? Isn’t the claim just nonsense on stilts? And if scientists really do know a way to make society work happily, why the hell aren’t they telling us? Are they holding the world to ransom until we buy them shinier laboratories?

The point of Olson’s book is that scientists need to learn to communicate better in order to “arouse the interest of the broader audience”. No doubt a laudable aim in general. But I fear that the promise that science can make society work happily is too arousing for its own good.

What kind of scientistic fantasy arouses you, readers?

1. See Unspeak, p226. «
2. No, I’m not going to go there. Oh wait, I just did? «
3. The book is addressed to other scientists, rather than to AN Wilson or “Melanie Phillips”. «
4. What, by magicking more stuff out of nothing? «

The writing was already on the wall in June, when the barely credible news broke that universities now fell under the aegis of the “Department for Business, Innovation and Skills”, straddled by “Lord” Mandelson.² Now this strange animal³ has been sending letters to university departments demanding to know what “impact” their research has, to the widespread annoyance of academics.

The latest academic response to this nonsense is more combatively entertaining: in the THES,⁴ professor of philosophy Simon Blackburn shreds the whole idiotic letter, fastening among other things on this idea that universities must provide what businesses “need”:

But we don’t think that you should pay slavish attention to what business people, especially those who believe themselves fit to judge things about which they know nothing, say are their “needs” because we do not have any confidence that without more philosophy than most of them possess, they have the least idea what those needs are. We merely note that conceptions of need that have given us such outstanding examples of business expertise as British Leyland, Rover and RBS seem strange instruments with which to assess institutions that enabled such legacies as those left by Bacon, Locke, Hume and Wittgenstein.

Go, Simon Blackburn!

But this story would be tedious if it were simply about the epic philistinism and crassness of one stupidly named government department, wouldn’t it, readers? And in all fairness, one must recognize that the “Department for Business, Innovation and Skills” is not concerned exclusively with what businesses need. It recognizes, of course, that universities need things too. Give us an example, “Lord” Mandelson, of “the major issues facing universities”!

the need to make greater contributions to the economy

Oh.

1. See Unspeak, p210. «
2. Universities had previously been in the “Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills”, which at least had “universities” in the title. That department lasted all of two years, which shows how seriously the government takes its organizational fiddling. «
3. The department, not “Lord” Mandelson personally, but then again, you know? «
4. I note reluctantly that, actually, the THES now appears no longer to be called the Times Higher Education Supplement, but merely Times Higher Education, which doesn’t make any sense; and the logo is a massive “THE”, which makes me think: “THE WHAT?”. In protest at this twittishness, I plan to continue calling it the THES until no one any longer has a clue what I’m talking about. «

The trouble with a ‘scientific’ argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts.

Oh yes, that is the trouble with scientific arguments! Which is why we need a government that is, by contrast, superlatively “imaginative” and utterly contemptuous of “empirical facts” to save us from ourselves.

I would incline to prefer your March 31 title [“Quantum Theory, Pragmatism and the Nature of Space-Time”], the reason being that it does not contain the phrase “Copenhagen interpretation,” which we in Copenhagen do not like at all. Indeed, this expression was invented, and is used by people wishing to suggest that there may be other interpretations of the Schrödinger equation, namely their own muddled ones.¹

In our terms, Rosenfeld is complaining that “Copenhagen interpretation” is Unspeak. There are other cases in which names for scientific ideas have become hostage to fortune — see, for example, this discussion of how Jerry Fodor thinks there’s something fishy about “natural selection”.

I was also reminded that Einstein had the phrase “relativity theory” more or less forced upon him: in private correspondence, he preferred to call his special theory of 1905 “invariant theory” or Invariantentheorie, and referred grumpily to “so-called ‘relativity theory’” for six years, until it was obvious the cause was lost, and a zillion dodgy metaphors were launched.

Other examples, readers?

1. Quoted in Jeremy Bernstein, Quantum Leaps (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), p78. «

I believe that Levitt’s ultimate claim to fame may rest on his having been as a pioneer of cyber-fascism, whereby a certain well-educated but (for whatever reason) academically disenfranchised group of people have managed to create their own parallel universe of what is right and wrong in matters of science, which is backed up (at least at the moment) by nothing more than a steady stream of invective. Their resentment demands a scapegoat — and ‘postmodernists’ function as Jews had previously.

You may charitably suppose that for a comfortably employed academic — one perfectly free to make a monumental fool of himself in his books, in courtrooms, and on the internet — to arrogate to himself and his “postmodernist” colleagues⁵ the kind of suffering historically experienced by Jews is merely a tasteless slip. Not at all! When challenged in comments, Fuller expands upon the “idea” still further:

I did not have the Holocaust in mind, since as far as I know Levitt didn’t even succeed in exterminating an idea, let alone an entire population. (I may be disrespectful but I’m not crazy!) You may recall that the Nazis scapegoated the Jews for all sorts of problems besetting Germany for nearly 20 years before exterminating them. It’s that orchestrated Anti-Semitism that is the basis of my comparison with the treatment of postmodernists, who ever since the end of the Cold War have been scapegoated for every public and policy ill that seems to have befallen the scientific community.⁶ I actually think the comparison is very apt.

How apt do you think the comparison is, readers?

1. Author of a risibly poor book called Dissent over Descent, which I reviewed here. «
2. Via Ben Goldacre. «
3. In particular, Levitt called one of Fuller’s books “a truly miserable piece of work, crammed with errors scientific, historical, and even theological”. Fuller now claims that Levitt’s criticisms were “so badly off the mark” that he “never deemed it appropriate to respond formally”: a curious turn of phrase since, formally or otherwise, Fuller did in fact respond in the same forum that printed Levitt’s original review, and Levitt responded to the response. Readers may judge for themselves who came out better from that exchange. «
4. See Unspeak, p.150. «
5. Many of whom, of course, are far more intellectually respectable than Steve Fuller. «
6. Personally, I will never forget how, when the Large Hadron Collider broke down last year, the fascist cry went up around the world that it was all the fault of the postmodernists. «

One half of the Rodnik design duo, Philip Colbert, is getting set to take his talent in a more cerebral direction; launching a collection with famous Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton. [...] The collection is named Smith & Rousseau, after a conversation between the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith and Swiss-born philiosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau; a reference to De Botton being Swiss and Colbert’s Scottish roots.

But away from all the theory

— yes please, my brain is already hurting from all this theory! —

what can we expect from the clothes?

Tell us!

“We are still very much in the development stages,” Colbert told us. “We’re looking at the pieces that are eternal in fashion — the perfect dress, the perfect jacket — pieces that define the perfect forms within contemporary clothing. It will be a capsule collection, mostly in black and white with a meaningful use of colour, for a thoughtful audience bored with the repetitive nature of fashion.”

It’s reassuring to know that de Botton and Colbert will be conceiving fashions for a thoughtful audience. Me, I have some of my best thoughts when I lend an ear to the bells of a jester’s cap delicately tinkling in the middle distance. What kind of clothes do you like to listen to, readers?

1. Yes, yes, I have “an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value”, but then again, who doesn’t? «

Of course, what is really happening is that either companies are going bust, or employers are choosing to sack employees. The latter is a case of an active verb that takes a human being as its object.

Even if we agree not to think about those human-being objects too hard, and continue instead with the more comfortable practice of describing what is happening to “jobs” in the passive voice, we should at least observe some symmetry of description. When businesses hire workers, it is said that jobs are being “created”. When they fire workers, it surely follows that jobs are being not “lost” but destroyed.