The crooked timber of humanity

Immanuel Kant (1784):  “From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

The original German is : "Aus so krummen Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden."

A word for word translation goes : “Out of timber so crooked, as that from which human beings are made, nothing entirely straight can be fashioned.”.  I don’t know German but I wish I did as it’s a wonderful language.

So, now geo-engineering is just normal science

Deliberately releasing sulphates
from aeroplanes to ward off
the effects of global warming

The current edition of Nature carries a story under the headline Geo-engineering can't please everyone which reports a recent study into the feasibility of adding aerosols to the atmosphere on a global scale.

It concludes that this “would not counter global warming in all regions”.

What's alarming, however, is that the world’s top science journal rates this sort of scheme, which ought to be classed as the ravings of lunatics, merely as a run of the mill news story.

It's some comfort that the study appears to come out against the scheme, but even so ...

How Prometheus brought fire, and his terrible punishment

Preface

Here's another in my series of stories for children.  This story has several parallels with Adam and Eve : through a small transgression, mankind acquires knowledge, involving loss of innocence. The new knowledge brings burdens as well as benefits, and moreover incurs the jealousy of a god, who metes out a disproportionate punishment.

The way I've told the story of Prometheus, the effect on mankind, loss of innocence etc, is dealt with only obliquely.  Sometime I'll check out a few versions of the story and consider expanding this aspect a bit. 

How Prometheus brought fire, and his terrible punishment

How are people different from the beasts?  This sounds like a simple question, but actually the simplest questions are sometimes the hardest. Some scientists say that the answer is that we have fire.  Fire enables us to cook, and cooking enables us to spend less time chewing our food, and more time growing our brains, which make us clever. 

But how did we get fire in the first place?  The ancient Greeks used to tell the story of Prometheus. Prometheus was a junior god, and he desperately wanted to get back at the chief god whose name was Zeus. I forget exactly why he wanted to get back at Zeus; but he certainly succeeded beyond his wildest dream. 

He did this by bringing the humans fire.

Up till that time, only the gods had fire.  Prometheus stole some of the gods’ fire and brought it down to Earth.  At first none of the gods noticed that the fire had been stolen. That’s the funny thing about stealing fire. You can take fire from a fire, and the fire is still there.  But one day the god Mercury, who was always flying around bringing messages, flew down to Earth and back up to Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, and said: Did any of you know that the humans have fire?

No, none of the gods knew this.

Yes, said Mercury, they’re cooking, and they’re smelting metals, and making ploughs and knives and things.

Does Zeus know about this, they all wondered?  Who would tell him?  None of them dared, they knew how angry he would be. Prometheus was present while this conversation took place but said nothing. He just stared into the distance and whistled softy to himself hoping that he looked nonchalant. All right, all right, said Mercury who was getting tired of the other gods’ subservient attitude, I'm not scared of Zeus, I'll tell him.

And he did. The humans have fire, he told Zeus. They’re cooking, and they’re smelting metal, and making ploughs and knives and other things.

And Zeus was cross. Very cross.  He threw thunderbolts all over the place.  The people down on Earth got an awful fright. Never had such thunderstorms been seen or heard as long as anyone could remember. 

Mercury was a messenger, and the first skill a messenger must learn is tact. Mercury was too tactful to tell Zeus all the things the humans were doing with fire. He could have mentioned the humans were making swords, which they were stabbing each other with.  He might also have mentioned firebrands which the humans were using to burn each other’s houses.  If Zeus had heard all this, who knows what he would have done.

Somehow Zeus discovered that it was Prometheus who had stolen the fire and given it to humans.  I don’t know how he found out.  Perhaps Prometheus confessed, or perhaps someone had seen him stealing the fire. There again, maybe Zeus was all-knowing.

Prometheus’s punishment was severe and gruesome.  Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock and sent an eagle to eat his liver.  All night the eagle gnawed at Prometheus’s liver and in the morning flew away. But the worst of it was, that the next day Prometheus’s liver grew back again. And the next night the eagle came back and gnawed it again. And so it went on, night after night. Prometheus’s punishment was never ending.  

Why, we may ask, was Zeus so annoyed at what Prometheus had done? Why the need to inflict this terrible punishment?  So humans had fire – was this really such a big deal? 

It’s this humans and gods thing. Is there a difference; and if so what is it?  Zeus feared that once humans had fire, nothing would prevent them becoming like gods themselves.  He became jealous, and perhaps he was right to be jealous. The longer you think about it, the more things we can do with fire. Good things, and bad things.  Fire makes us human. And maybe like gods.  We have Prometheus to thank; and Prometheus is in everlasting torment for it.

In defence of bible stories

A typical children’s bible story book.
The Joseph story is one that I have
often told to Martha (age 5)

I've been surprised by the number eyebrows raised at me telling Martha bible stories. Even though the eyebrow raising is probably at least half in jest.

Some think, or for the sake of a laugh claim to think, that I'm letting down the atheist cause and colluding in the indoctrination of the young.

From the other side of the argument it’s sometimes suggested that I'm up to something devious or that I'm secretly “looking for something” in that quaint phrase which is meant to imply I'm about the find the Lord. (I had an uncle who was a prayer warrior. He used to accost strangers on buses and ask them if they had Found The Lord. But I digress.)

I hardly think that telling bible stories requires an explanation but here it is for the curious. The story of Adam and Eve, for example, is one of the foundation myths of western culture. It’s unthinkable that any child should grow up not knowing it. The same goes for Oedipus, which I'm working on now, but that doesn’t get the eyebrows raised, or if it does for wholly different reasons.

And then imagine going through life saying that so and so is a good samaritan, without knowing the story behind the phrase.

True, many Bible stories presuppose the existence of God; but then other stories presuppose the existence of giants, goblins, talking animals, the Norse or Greek gods, and so on. I suppose you could say that by mixing religious stories in with non-religious I'm subtly undermining the idea that religion should be accorded a special place.

But that would be to ascribe underhand motives to me unjustifiably.

Read my tellings of Oedipus and Adam & Eve

The No True Scotsman trick

“No Scotsman ever puts sugar on his porridge oats”

“But Angus McSporran does!”

“Ah, then Angus McSporran is not a true Scotsman!”

Anthony Flew is responsible for exposing this fallacious type of argument, in his 1975 book Thinking About Thinking.

I read this in “Philosophy Now” where I also see that this little book should be read by everybody, although it will annoy me because a large proportion of the examples are taken from muddles in what might well be seen as left-wing thinking.

The no true Scotsman thing tickles me, so I'll read the book anyway.

Flew has recently died. He was an atheist who a few years ago famously converted to Christianity or at least to Deism.  No true atheist would do such a thing,  therefore ....

Bertrand Russell on apricots

Bertrand Russell presents this argument in favour of useless knowledge:

“I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of Han Dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them to India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word ‘apricot’ is derived from the same Latin source as the word ‘precocious’, because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.”

(In Praise of Idleness, 1935)

PS the false etymology intrigues me, but I haven't managed to track it down to my satisfaction

Deference and erroneous deference - a hobbyhorse

Deferring to a linguistic authority figure is always wrong but “she lives a long way from John and I” is doubly wrong.

Not only is the speaker deferring to an authority figure; but they have misinterpreted what the authority figure actually said. No teacher ever told you to put the nominative after a preposition.  Of all linguistic mistakes the erroneous deference grates with me most.  No child naturally says “from John and I”. You have to teach yourself to say “from John and I”.  And teach yourself wrong!  Bah!

A common instance of mere deference, as opposed to erroneous deference, is avoiding the split infinitive. It’s usually harmless but occasionally sounds a bit contrived.  The supreme example of a good split infinitive is “to boldly go”.  The context is the introductory text spoken at the beginning of Star Trek episodes : “To boldly go where no man has gone before”.  Does it work?  Yes. Does it sound good?  Yes. Therefore it's good English.

The rule against the split infinitive has indeed been promulgated, so in that narrow sense, deferring to it isn't erroneous.  But whoever promulgated the rule acted without authority, for there can be no authority in language.  (Apart, that is, from your humble servant.)

Note added since I first wrote this. The technical term for avoiding one grammatical trap only to fall into another is hypercorrection.

Ending a sentence with a preposition

Digressing from my theme, another rule that isn't a rule is “never end a sentence with a preposition”.  Actually it’s one of the glories of the Germanic languages that you can end a sentence with a preposition.  Churchill had his faults but he knew his English.  Once, when a civil servant re-cast a sentence of Churchill’s to avoid this alleged error, he reinstated the original word order adding in the margin: “this is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put.”   The anecdote comes in many varieties and seems to be undocumented, but even so it’s one of those stories that just has to be true.  The version I have given comes from a fabulous English teacher I had when I was 12.

And no, fellow pedants, I don’t mean that my English teacher was mythical!