Mick Hartley

The Greatest Happiness

There's something bland and unsatisfactory about the concept of happiness as a measure of worth. What does it mean to be happy? A fairly reliable way to get happy is to get drunk. So is that better than, say, performing a life-saving operation? That would maybe give you satisfaction, but it would sound strange to say it made you feel happy. If someone was described as happy all the time, you'd probably assume they were some sort of moron - or at least someone you'd have no interest in meeting. And what would you say if an interviewer asked you if you were happy? Well, um, it depends....

This - and today in the Times here - aims to put forward a philosophy of happiness, and, in keeping with its subject, is unsatisfactory and bland.

There is a shocking fact: we are no happier than we were 50 years ago, despite unparalleled economic growth. This fact, revealed in surveys in Britain and the US, challenges our most basic assumptions about the goals of society and our personal life.

No it doesn't: or only if you're the sort of idiot who thinks that polls about happiness tell us something profound.

A society based on getting ahead cannot be truly happy, for as many get behind as get ahead.

Where do you start with that? Here's someone who not only hasn't learnt from history: he seems unaware that it happened. You don't need to be a libertarian to find this whole approach completely wrong-headed. What's particularly depressing is that the author, Richard Layard, is apparently a Labour party advisor.

He sets himself against what he sees as our age of "unprecedented individualism", yet brings in utilitarianism as a measure of a healthy society:

The desire to be happy is central to our nature. And, following the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, I want a society in which people are as happy as possible and in which each person's happiness counts equally. That should be the philosophy for our age, the guide for public policy and for individual action. And it should come to replace the intense individualism which has failed to make us happier.

If you want to combat intense individualism, it seems strange to proceed by simply summing the happiness of each individual. But it gets worse:

To measure happiness, we can ask a person how happy he is, or we can ask his friends or independent investigators. These reports yield similar results. The breakthrough has been in neuroscience. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has identified an area in the left front of the brain where good feelings are experienced, and another in the right front where bad feelings are experienced. Activity in these brain areas alters sharply when people have good or bad experiences. Those who describe themselves as happy are more active on the left side than unhappy people, and less active on the right side. So the old behaviourist idea that we cannot know how other people feel is now under attack.

So, as Robert McHenry suggests, why not just implant electrodes in that good-feeling area and hand each of us a little button to push as often as we like? Or develop some new soma-like pills we can all ingest?

Layard thinks he's battling individualism, but his whole approach simply reinforces it. Or, to put it another way, the whole emphasis on happiness is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It makes me unhappy just thinking about it.

Escape with Tracey

I suppose people must go to these places, but there's something horribly smug about the Observer's travel supplement Escape, with its more-adventurous-than-thou letter of the week:

"We're planning a four week trip to Bolivia in May, white-water rafting down the Espadrillo with our 4-year old twins, and would like to do some armadillo tickling. Also, we hope to see the flying monks of San Miguel. Is there any way we can fit all this in?"

"You're in luck. Bratpack Tours do regular armadillo-tickling expeditions out of Timparano, which can be reached from Espadrillos Nuevos by a 10-day llama trek over the Sierra Blanca, which is incidentally the most likely place to get a sighting of the flying monks. Don't miss the wonderfully colourful cat-strangling festival in Lianas in the third week of May, though you'll need to pre-book your hotel there due to the crowds. The profiteroles in the Cafe Lucia are not to be missed."

This week, as an added bonus to we vicarious travellers, there's a special issue of Escape, in which various C-list celebs ("Britain's edgiest travellers") are asked, post-gonzo, where the great man - Hunter S Thompson, that is - might travel today in search of kicks.

Ageing dopehead Howard Marks goes for, er, Cardiff:

If Hunter S Thompson was around in 2005, he'd choose Cardiff. There are better-tasting chips, more drugs - the green, green grass of home and magic mushrooms - more alcohol consumption. The women are prettier (you wouldn't even notice Catherine Zeta-Jones), there's better music (Stereophonics, Super Furry Animals, and Goldie Looking Chain), less neon and fewer Americans.

Life continues all night (in the streets rather than air-conditioned casinos). And you can watch the world's best sports events.

Tracey Emin ("artist") picks Bangkok:

I'm just not into debauchery these days, but for wildness go to Bangkok. It's where I bought boy number 54, in a pair of Calvin Klein white underpants in a very hard-core gay bar. The idea is that you buy a boy to have sex with him. I didn't, but we took him out for the night and he became our guide to the Bangkok where tourists never normally go.

We went to a place where men stand on the bar and masturbate in front of you. Then there are the lady-boys who expel nuts from their anuses (or maybe it's their vaginas?). The nuts are attached to pins, and they fly out across the room and burst balloons. The clubs with women are mad, too. You're sitting there with 80 Thai women around your feet.

Oooh...isn't Tracey naughty, boys and girls? She doesn't just go to gay bars, she goes to very hard-core gay bars. But really, you know, at heart she's a good girl: you buy a boy to have sex with him. I didn't.

Hunter S Thompson may have gone off in his later years, but he deserves better than this.

Chinese Nationalism

It's a fairly standard line now: with communism discredited as a unifying ideology, the regime in Beijing have resorted to nationalism. Here's an article on anti-Japanese sentiment in China (via Peking Duck):

With his trim, camel-colored jacket and stylish haircut, Lu doesn't look like a political zealot. But his cool demeanor belies the heat of his anti-Japanese views. Once a fan of Japanese movies and cartoons, Lu now says that by confronting China in recent incidents and refusing to apologize for its aggression in World War II, Tokyo is headed down "a fascist road."

Lu's uncompromising views are shared by many Chinese. They help explain why relations between China and Japan have plummeted to their lowest point in years.

"We should teach the Japanese a good lesson and let them know how tough the Chinese people are," says Li Jin, 28, a freelance writer. "Maybe we should nuke them once and for all." [...]

"I think the Americans have the wrong friend. Japan is like a mad dog, and sooner or later, it'll cause the U.S. great trouble," says Zhang Yihua, 32, an advertising designer.

On Saturday in Washington, the United States and Japan issued a joint document that advocated the "peaceful resolution" of the status of Taiwan, the island that Beijing regards as a renegade province. Within days, a commentary in the state-run China Daily newspaper blasted that mild statement as "an irresponsible and reckless move that will have grave consequences." [...]

Today's democratic Japan, whose military is constitutionally limited to self-defense, bears little resemblance to the empire that ravaged Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. But Friedman says the Chinese have "blinded themselves to this reality."

Even those too young to have experienced the war are bitter. "Japan brought a lot of harm and pain to the Chinese people. Millions of people died," Lu says. "This is history that nobody can erase."

The mass famines of the Great Leap Forward, the brutal purges of the Cultural Revolution, and the occupation of Tibet, are also history that nobody can erase.

Welcome Squid Overlords

Prepared for the upcoming mammal vs. cephalopod war? Didn't think so. As the ad says: the cephalopod biomass is now greater than the human biomass. We don't know how many there are or how big they get. We are NOT ready. Play it smart.

Linguistics

It's been a while since I read any of Chomsky's writings on linguistics. As is well known, he blew apart the old behaviourist model of language acquisition with his review of Skinner's book "Verbal Behaviour" back in 1959. There must, he argued, be an innate linguistic competence, as the poverty of a child's experience of language is in marked contrast to the complexity of the acquired linguistic ability. The battle was won and the Chomskian model has been the dominant paradigm in linguistics ever since.

Chomsky has never shown much interest in the evolution of linguistic competence. It was a reasonable approach for him to take in the sense that origins were not what he was interested in and wouldn't help the business of untangling the actual inner workings of language, but it seems like what was originally a methodological decision to take innate linguistic competence as a given became a fact about the world, such that linguistic competence was beyond the reach of the usual Darwinian evolutionary logic. [I tried to argue here that this switch from methodology to ontology was something to be found in his political writings as well: an appropriate methodology for an American of concentrating solely on US sins turned into a world where the only sins were American sins.]

So where are we now? Carl Zimmer has posted the first of two articles on language on his website, and it gives those of us who aren't prepared (or equipped) to wade through the professional journals as good an overview as we're likely to get. On one side we have Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct) and Paul Bloom (Descartes Baby) arguing for the importance of evolutionary pressures for the development of language: against them there's the Chomsky faction who argue that language may just be some sort of evolutionary side-effect (a "spandrel" in Stephen Jay Gould's terms), or that nearly all the elements for linguistic competence are present in other animals, and all it needed in humans was a little extra something, like recursion. The latest article from Pinker, with Ray Jackendoff, is according to Zimmer an all-out attack on Chomsky's recent writings, which, they hint, have a creationist ring to them.

Zimmer promises some sort of resolution in his second post. Should be interesting.

Dem Bones

The bones of Homo Floresiensis - the "hobbit" - which were appropriated by Indonesian scientist Teuku Jacob, have finally been returned. As Carl Zimmer explains, this feud is about whether the hobbit is indeed a new species, as its finders claim, or whether it is, as Jacob believes, simply an individual with a birth defect called microcephaly. But this reflects a deeper conflict: whether modern humans, as most scientists now believe, are descended from a small group of Africans some 200,000 years ago, or - the multiregional hypothesis - the exodus from Africa was much earlier, and we've evolved in parallel since then in different regions. Jacob is a multiregionalist.

It was thus not a complete surprise to learn last week that Teuku Jacob had arranged for two multiregionalists, Alan Thorne and Maciej Henneberg to examine the Homo floresiensis bones. Publicity may have been one motivation--a 60 Minutes crew was apparently filming the proceedings--but something very significant happened along the way. Two grams of the fossil material was extracted and sent to Germany to look for DNA.

....[F]inding Hobbit DNA is the best way to test the hypothesis that these fossils belong to another species. If the Australians are right, its DNA should be only remotely similar to the DNA of all living humans. If Jacob is right, the DNA should resemble the DNA of living Southeast Asians more than other humans.

But any results that come from the DNA Jacob and company have extracted will probably be viewed with a lot of skepticism. It is very easy for fossils to become contaminated with the DNA of living humans once they are unearthed, and it very difficult to distinguish between contamination and any ancient DNA the fossils might contain. Jacob didn't help matters when he "borrowed" the bones; apparently they were simply stuffed into a leather bag and brought to him.

Ice Walls

From north of Fairbanks, Alaska - the Ice Wall Project (via Metafilter).

You only have to be driving into Goldstream Valley, at its upstream end by Fox, just over the hill north of Fairbanks, in the dark of winter, and suddenly see this huge, free standing tower of white and blue ice, or whatever it might be, glowing in floodlights, unlike anything you have ever imagined, which was not there the last time you went to Fox a few months ago. You would look at your speedometer, check for any open containers, look for cops, slow down, and wonder if you were the only one in town to have seen what you just saw, or if you were the last one to find out.

Ayman Nour Update

Ayman Nour, leader of Egypt's liberal opposition party al_Ghad ("Tomorrow"), was arrested a month ago. After renewed interrogation by Mubarak's agents, he's now in a prison clinic (via American Future):

On Monday President Bush again called on Egypt to "lead the way" toward democratic change in the Middle East. Apparently Hosni Mubarak, the country's leader for the past 24 years, wasn't listening. Later that same day, Mr. Mubarak's agents renewed their "interrogation" of Ayman Nour, the imprisoned head of the liberal Tomorrow Party. Six hours later -- at 1 a.m. -- Mr. Nour, a diabetic with a history of heart trouble, was "sweating, vomiting and holding his left arm," his wife told the Reuters news agency. Authorities refused his doctor's request that he be hospitalized; instead, he was taken Tuesday to a prison clinic. The Egyptian Human Rights Organization has issued a statement warning that Mr. Nour's life is in danger. [...]

The charge against Mr. Nour, that he is responsible for the forgery of some of the petitions submitted to register his party, is dismissed as groundless by independent Egyptian lawyers. In truth, he is in jail because, like Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister who was assassinated last week, he offered a fresh democratic alternative in a Middle East stirred by the votes of Iraqis and Palestinians. Mr. Nour, like most of the rest of the Egyptian opposition, is not proposing a revolution. Their demand is that Mr. Mubarak lift repressive "emergency" laws and agree to constitutional reforms that would make future elections democratic. Many Egyptian activists, like Mr. Nour, would probably agree to an extension of the president's term in exchange for his commitment to the constitutional change. The alternative, they point out, is not the "stability" Mr. Mubarak claims to offer, but merely more of the stagnation that has made Egypt a prime breeding ground for Islamic extremists, including many of the leaders of al Qaeda.

Anglo-French Relations

Sebastian Faulks reviews "Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France " by John Pemble (via AL Daily), about French resistance to Shakespeare and all things Anglo, and recalls some bizarre translations:

As late as 1904, when King Lear was staged for the first time in Paris, Kent’s lines at the height of the storm, “The tyranny of the open night’s too rough / For nature to endure” became “Il n’est pas possible de rester plus longtemps dehors.”

This reminded me of the hours I spent in Left-bank cinemas as a student learning French by reading the subtitles of English films. My brother claims to have seen a western in which the trail-weary cowboy’s first line on entering the saloon — “Gimme a shot of red eye” — was translated as “Un Dubonnet, s’il vous plaît”.

North Korean Refugees

As Ruud Lubbers quits as UN High Commissioner for Refugees over allegations of sexual harassment, Claudia Rossett looks at the real scandal: the failure of the UNHCR to stand up for North Korean refugees in China (via NK Zone):

The situation, by U.N. lights, is of course complex. For more than a decade, North Koreans have been fleeing their country by the only avenue even partly open to them--past the northern border patrols, into China. An estimated 300,000 North Koreans are in hiding in China today. They have a well-founded fear of persecution, should they be sent back. Testimony has stacked up high and wide--much of it over the past four years, on Mr. Lubbers's watch-- that if returned these refugees would likely end up starved or worked to death in the labor camps of Kim Jong Il. Some are murdered outright. One recent dispatch from a South Korean private aid group, the Headquarters for the Protection of North Korean Defectors, reports that according to sources inside North Korea the regime there just last month executed some 60 North Korean would-be defectors sent back by China, killing at least eight in public, in the northern city of Chongjin--to deter others from making a run for it.

Such would-be refugees have been dying faceless, nameless and scarcely even remarked upon by the world community. But these were human beings. They had faces and names. From what we know of conditions in North Korean detention centers, it's a good bet they were freezing, famished and quite possibly tortured in the hours before they were then murdered in public due to the combined and systematic state policies of China and North Korea.

Where is the U.N. in all this? Under the U.N. Refugee Convention--which Beijing has signed and the UNHCR, with its $1.1 billion budget, is supposed to administer--these North Koreans refugees had rights. The convention promised them not a return to their deaths, but at least safe transit through China to a place of asylum.

The UNHCR keeps an office in Beijing, with a budget this year totaling $4.4 million, to which asylum seekers have no access. Four years ago, a family of North Korean refugees actually stormed the premises and gained asylum after threatening to eat rat poison from their pockets if forced back out onto the street. Since then, the UNHCR has allowed China's security agents to better defend the compound against further visits by the people the UNHCR is supposedly in China to protect.