John Mortimer

Sir John Mortimer, barrister and freedom-fighter, died on 16th January 2009, aged 85

As usual, reading The Economist's obituary is a literal enjoyment, which is so unique that I can't think of an adjective that quite resembles one with which I could have come up for any food I tasted. Every week I read a life of brilliance, humbleness, controversy, you name only a few.

Every true-born Englishman knows that the law is an ass. Rules are better honoured in the breach than the observance. Judges are best represented in a chorus line at the D'Oyly Carte. The English constitution is a vague formulation in someone's head, and that foundation of English liberties, Magna Carta, is best known for banning eel-traps in the Thames. The firm clip of the law is for the other fellow. Behind the furled umbrellas and decorum, Englishmen are anarchists. Or, as John Mortimer liked to think of them, votaries of 'my darling' Prince Kropotkin.

How nicely a paragraph could be phrased and how much excitment such a paragraph could be read with!

The Age of Unreason

A lot of us talk about the absurdity of our era, about people of these days being unreasonable, and probably about our society being anti-rational (in which the term rational is used in a general sense). Regardless of what our world looks like, it is apparent that people seem to be unable to reason. In a radical sense, this means human stops being homo sapiens. Betrand Russell said, in his essay The Ancestry of Fascism, that the revolt against reason begins with the revolt of reasoning. Russell has his own reasoning. I am not here to repeat how Hume destroyed causation which in turn destroyed the foundation of science. All I want to do is to describe these people being unreasonable, our society being anti-rational and our era being absurd. It is only a description and leaves rationale behind later. This description, without rationale, seems to some the equivalent of those unreasonable, anti-rational and absurd people I am attacking. No, not true. When something we sense is by reason accepted to be so, which is to say, we have no reason to refute what we see, then it is likely that it is true - or at least it is not absolutely wrong or illogical that it cannot exist. It exists. More importantly, I am a rational person, and I am reasonable. I live in a world that is far from absurd, albeit that I know of such a world which I attempt to avoid with all my efforts but regrettably - admittedly - with which I must interact.

Russell was right in pointing out that when the political ecology becomes more heterogeneous, it would be hard to attribute issues to reason, for the diversity in values makes it impossible to argue from a common assumption. If the value of judgement is not the same among each others, then it will not be possible that reasonableness takes place in the argument. Each party comes to his own conclusion from his own starting point. The gap is unbridgeable as a result. The only way is to subject the opposition to force; otherwise, both sides continue to argue and keep on arguing to the point when both lose their temper and at the end defer to force for resolution. We shall be glad to know that at this point in time, politics only just reach the point when both side are arguing. In many parts of the world, the so-called matured democracies come to the point of keeping on arguing. When economically the society can sustain such wasteful behaviour, the arguing continues. One day will come to a point where people cannot find their subsistence and by then they no longer believe argument per se is the effecutal means to acheive what they think to be an end of their own good. Then we jump to force and violence for a final and quick solution. This sounds less probably but possible.

Those immature democracies, pseudo-democracies, democratic totalitarian states and failed states (of different degrees) can come to the final point much easier. However, in the city where I regrettably reside, there is less of a concern to come to the violent resolution, for one particular reason I assure you of the safety - the intellectually castrated citizens are enormous in number. No other how these castrated dogs cannot act violently, as they lack the organ that secrets the hormone to make them violent. They are violent to the extent that they shout at each other in the subway train or yell to some anonymous parties on an internet forum. But when they are given a gun, they have their shit scared out of them and shake and break. Such useless, castrated animals, jumping and joking, hysterically grinning and shouting, fully occupy this place. They know, perhaps, by heart, that in a decade of two, they would turn inferior to the group of humans, whom they once abhored and derided but who have become their masters, and turn totally of no use to them. As a consequence their castration becomes a blessing, for they do not need to reproduce and no more castrated animals to come to this world. The reproduction rate of this city is the lowest in the world. The Age of Unreason tells us that when reason goes away, the barbarism comes to fill its vacuum, which seals the people's fate. The unfortunate thing is when we live in a world which is rational, reasonable and beautiful, we have to tolerate an anti-world that is spreading and no too soon devouring ours.

To the Land of the Covenant

'Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they cannot understand one another's language.' Genesis 11:7

I have asked myself in another web log why the 1980's matters. There should be sociological theories to explain it but all I should like to say is in Japan, the 1980's truly was the golden age not only of scientific and humanity progress but also in music and movies. The animation, or anime, as this form of expression is called, is one of the best developed form of art, if you will. The efforts the Japanese anime artists put into an animated movie is unthinkable unless you have seen one. In 1989-1990, when Japan's asset bubble was almost blown up, a movie called Patlabor the movie, which was an extension of the eponymous TV anime series, was carefully produced. Patlabor is the team of police, equipped with robots, Patlabors, established by the police department to tackle crimes and situations created by robots which are widely used in Tokyo. This first movie version of Patlabor is shocking in images and reality. The delineation of a post-buble Tokyo realistically reflects what Japan is going to face - in a bleak future some people endeavour to protect the things that decent people hold dear. The whole movie defies anything you want from an anime, from the pace to the speech. It is a movie, a dramatic scientific fiction which subtlety covers the dramaticity that could be mistaken as boring and pointless.

The title song, To the Land of the Covenant, is to me the best anime song I have ever come across (the second best is Megazone 23 Part 2 - Please.give.me.the.secret). The title sounds biblical, which in a sense reflects the rationale behind the story of the Patlabor movie that people have become corrupted in the financial bubble and lost their own self - but retained a vacuous ego; so some cleansing work must be done and the remaining good ones are promised a place where God and the good make a covenant. The 'God' is never disclosed in the movie however in the middle, an investigator concludes him to be evil, for he was (he was dead) not truly God as we all know in the conventional sense, but he was the unfathomable one who had some idea that he believed to be right. The song creates a sense of sin which people, the reprobates, have committed and for which they must accept penalty - but the brightness in the rhythm conveys message that the Land of the Covenant is there in store for all of us, but we have to endeavour to fight for it, to fight because of it. The team of Patlabor is among the good; because of whom the world is worth fighting for. How can I forget when confronting a bleak future.

Postscript: The quotation of the Book of Genesis is not from the Catholic edition. I just followed that in the movie.

Celebrating Darwin

The Economist writes of Darwin in the latest edition, saying, correctly, that the evolutionary theory perhaps is the only scientific theory that is not widely accepted. No normal person, regardless of how much science knowledge he bears, would be proud to say that he does not believe in Einstein's theory of relativity; probably all he would say is he has no idea of what Einstein's theory is all about. However, Darwin's theory, which has obviously satisfied all parameters as a valid scientific theory, sounds somewhat controversial 150 years after the Origin of Species was published. In fact the evolving nature of living organism, as the newspaper points out, was not first raised by Darwin. Thinkers far older than Darwin such as the Greek philosopher Empedocles, who was born in 490 bca, are known to have suggested that nature selection might explain why living organisms were adapted to their surroundings. The idea of struggle for existence could be traced back to a Muslim theologian al-Jahiz born in 776 ca. But why, after man has lived through ages of ignorance and begun to enjoy an enlightened life, is he in doubt of Darwin's theory? There are plenty of reasons. I can think of one here: man is too proud to come to the cruel reality that he is no better than other living organisms that share the Earth with him, after thousands of years of theocratic hypnosis. Theocratic hypnosis. Yes, and ironically, the substance this term is supposed to refer to is, in fact, a result of evolutionary force that makes man adaptable to the environment he once lived in. Is there a reason to awaken a man who is still in a Dark Ages slumber, a consequence of theocratic hypnosis. I am not entirely sure of this, despite the fact that I abhor ignorance and barbarism; but I am not sure if the slumber we are in should be utmost interrupted. However, some waking moments are worth pursuing.
To me, the evolution theory is easy to grasp and nice to follow, for, as I said, it has all the attributes of a scientific theory, and so it is falsifiable. Unlike some other arguments such as Intelligent Design which I am not particularly convinced to accept, evolutionary theory has a firm ground to base on and the ground is increasingly strengthened as we find more fossil record and have progress on genetics and molecular biology. Some people who obviously possess a brain which is inferior, in a Darwinian term, do not like to accept they themselves and chimpanzees (probably) share the same ancestor. While I do not like this (because chimpanzees obviously live a much fuller life than those people and it would not be fair if they share the same ancestor as these human beings), I do not deny this likelihood if such likelihood is high enough.

A Bookish Life on the Verandah

I have no right to complain of my life so far as the substance I have been given is concerned. The title of this weblog is all about my life on the verandah of my humble but resourceful apartment. I must qualify that humble is a gentlemanly modesty expected of any educated person. Despite having no right to complain, I preserve my right to be concerned. I am concerned about the doom of civilisation and unlike the trampling of Rome by the barbarians when civilisation survived by the skin of its teeth. We are now at risk of oblivion without much to rely on if civilisation is to be saved. One characteristics of this life on the verandah is its bookishness, if you will. There I may have a cigar, a cup of coffee or a dram of single malt, but it is not complete without a book. There is a profound difference between a life of gastronomy and a life of letters. The former is likely to be infesting among the affluent whereas the latter is more likely now than ever to be at the risk of extinction among them. This is a shame when in the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance, those rich people performed their oblige noblesse. They were rich but entirely passionate about art. The rich nouveau become parvenu simply because they lack the organ to appreciate art which, in my opinion, formulates the skeleton of a civilisation, and without which I am doubtful if a society can be classified among the civilised societies. The reason why I am concerned, as I just explained, is because these days the worst is deemed the best, the golden rule to follow, the silver bullet. Quite the contrary, I am afraid the worst, as these attributes were classified in civilised intelligence but muddled through in today's idiots who control the media, would dominate our world such that the once best and good are swamped and die out. Humanity is submerging into barbarism; one which is different from 2,000 years ago in that the latter was barbaric, but with less ingrained detrimental effects than the former. Modern barbarism was created by those good intentions for high quality people. But they are now abused by the worse kind who is given to live a diligent life but who cannot because of their bad genes.

Why should one tell the truth if it's is to one's advantage to tell a lie

This is the question lingering in Wittgenstein's mind, when the 20th century's greatest philosopher was only eight. He probably believed it has no harm to lie, quite a shock to many who rightly believed that Wittgenstein was a truthful person. Wittgenstein always had his own reason. For a layman such as myself, I think of this question, capably, only from the perspective of the advantageousness of telling a lie. The reason why I seldomly tell a lie is entirely due to the fact that I know I cannot gain any advantage by telling a lie with a long view. Wittgenstein is right that it is nothing wrong to tell a lie in such circumstances, that is to say, when it is to your advantage. The only part that is missing, deliberately or otherwise, is for how long. I may tell a lie and get away with a felony I did at a certain point in time; for which it is to my advantage to lie. However, if I have to lie continually thereafter and those lies become inconsistent among each others, which I say consciously or unconsciously and as a result of the utterance of such words and such inconsistency arising therefrom, I put myself in a situation far more difficult than when I did my felony. And more importantly, if I am frank about the felony from the outset, I am forgiven; then obviously telling a lie in this context is truly not to my advantage.

The question remains, how could I know whether, at a certain point in time, it is to my advantage to lie or to be honest? The answer is not straightforward and easy. But I think it is answerable, with certain disentangling of the world's fundamental values. What are the fundamental values? First of all, it is the complexity of the lie. If the lie you have to make up is complicated, the chance of its being spotted as a lie is higher. Secondly, the time frame you have to maintain the lie. The longer the time frame, the more likely you will slip some truth out of the lying process. Thirdly, the seriousness of the consequence if the lie is revealed. Normally this follows the fourth point. If level of seriousness is high, you may probably avoid lying from the outset. However, having said that, one may avoid the seriousness of the consequence if the truth is told and therefore lie, which is the fourth point I wish to make. We need to weigh on the two - whether the seriousness of the consequence if the lie is revealed is higher than that if the truth is told from the beginning.

Life

Perhaps I am not stating my point clearly. When I said organisms that live on instinct fare better, I mean compared with those who cannot live up to what instinct requires them to live, those organisms that live on instinct are better. I want to talk about life here.

On Liberty

People talk of pros and cons, judging them and deciding which way to go, if they are in a liberal nation in which they are free to do and act as long as the law permits. Compared with autocratic nations, free nations are better choices as a living place and learning ground. However, people tend to rot and they abuse freedom.

Love

I am highly skeptical of the claim that human is unique and superior to other living organisms on Earth, and more so of the claim that human is superior because he has developed love. I even more abhor people who conceitedly claim that human is superior because he has developed love on the premise that God created man with such capability of developing love, and that God created man in His own image which is love. There are so many different claims, Christian or otherwise, that sell human love. Perhaps we are a bit different, but not superior, because we have developed rationality and had a pair of dexterous hands; but I don't think it defensible to claim that our rationality and love ensue from a higher being and automatically we become superior to other living organisms, which, you may wish to say generally, in certain sense, live on instinct that in fact appears to fare far better than human beings. I need to emphasise the word automatically. For man is not automatically superior because he is created to bear these attributes, it is ironic to believe that the ability to love that a man bears positions himself on the top of the planet, let alone managing the planet.

I qualify my statement by saying in a certain sense, organisms live on instinct fare better. In what sense? You would probably ask. In the sense as a living organism to such extent that it lives its life in full. I think only man behaves obnoxiously or only man can behave in such a manner that makes decent fellow men sick. Because of rationality and love, man is rotten. Alas, I am not going to be accepted if decency is no longer warranted in the presence of rationality and love. Who will forgive me debasing the foundation of humanity. Why can the availability of rationality and love, such superior attributes, make man rot? The only explanation is that not all men are created with these attributes. A certain percentage of men are defected items, which have no such organs that accommodate love or trigger rationality. The rotten organs they have are those who imitate love and rationality by applying sub-human attributes which are the worst in any conscious beings and living organisms.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Why, all of a sudden, has a people lost entirely its dignity and continued to live in hypocrisy and degradation, while, I have to admit, materially its members have gained what many other peoples envy to the death? I need to speculate profoundly in order that I am hopeful of getting an answer; perhaps, I have not speculated profoundly enough so far; which, as a consequence of my lack of progress, makes all endeavours to treat this people in dignity futile. In fact, I am not saddened by the fact that this people has no dignity at all or that I have not recalled once it had. As I always like to mention, the founding fathers of the Constitution of the United States of America, believe that the pursuit of happiness is a proper goal of human, I naturally think that a people who pursue happiness are bound to gain dignity, as a dignified people have a proper goal. The deduction is right, only the premiss is wrong for this people - this hopeless people which is lucky enough to carry on what it does not deserve. How dare it criticise and complain!

All-Goodness

When coming to Judeo-Christian God, a concept that fails from the outset is all-goodness.  It has been a complicated concept to construct a god that is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent but still conceptually these attributes are imaginable, albeit a twist of the concepts and some qualifications are inevitable.  However, to argue that a god is all good is a thornier task in our world.  Although the all-goodness is imaginable, it is not defensible in our world where evil is.  The very concept, put to test of logic and observation, is obviously defeated before actual argument is built up. However, a lot of people are still strenuously attempting to defend it.  Richard Swinburne, an Oxford theologist, is one and I have to admit, he is almost there in his Existence of God.  The problem of evil per se does not defeat the all-goodness argument but it is the availability of the higher order of the evil that does.  It is arguable and clearly defensible that God is all good with minor evils, e.g., small pain that alerts you imminent danger, or ordeal that strengthens your will and reminds you of greater virtues.  But higher orders, for example, large scale and serious natural disasters that kill thousands of people and result in loss of family members, cannot be explained easily if at all possible.  

Morality of the Strong

Unfortunate substances spread like wildfire.  Moralists or pseudo-moralists love to think of dilemmas and are delighted to show to the world that moral dilemmas are unsolvable and inevitable.  Regardless of what they intend to show, they pronounce that they belong to the weak, and their morality is that of the weak and for the weak.  When some moralist asks which one, your mother or your wife, you would save on a sinking ship (provided that there is only one vacant seat on the lifeboat), they believe they think brilliantly and design a scenario that is perfectly unsolvable, a question unanswerable.  He advises strongly that we shall think and argue if we intend to save one but not the other.  Let me tell you, Gentlemen, there is nothing worth squandering a second on.  This is the morality of the weak.  Compassion, kindness and love are received in the weak; they are given by the strong.  Such sinking ship, such situation - the strong will know it is nothing but an inevitability in which the strong will make a choice and confer it with his own reason.  That is the end of the story.  The strong bestow compassion, kindness and love.  They have their own values that need not be reminded.  But unfortunately when malignant discivilisation takes the dominant place in the stead of good civilisation, unfortunate substances grow and spread.  Humankind is contaminated and suffers from incurable disease of the weak.  Humans let themselves be weak and remain weak.  They create a lot of ingredients to protect them from harm, to seal them from touching the most precious thing they once had, instinct.  When instinct is lost, weakness comes in.

Critique of Pure Reason

It sounds extremely naive to write of a title like this one. But I am not here to intepret what Kant had said. What I would like to say is punctuality. Kant's life is uneventful. He was reportedly obsessed (well this might not be a correct word) in punctuality. It was said that the whole city of Konigsberg adjusted the clock with his passing by every day. On one occasion, Kant stayed home for a few days to read Rousseau's Emile. The whole city was late.

In the city in which I temporarily reside, I find it increasingly difficult to meet sometime on time, or, to put it more mildy, in time. To meet someone on time is a difficult task as there is only one point in time with the two parties meeting that makes a meeting on time. But to meet one in time is easier, I suppose, if both parties do not arrive later than the appointed time.

Perhaps the lateness, so to speak, is attributable to the emergence of mobile phone; whereby people can postpone meetings in the last minute. But I think it is more to do with one's declining mentality when technology advances. Those people I come across are all stupid beings. Quite to the contrary of conventional wisdom (well, who possesses wisdom these days?), technological advancement, progress in medicine, reduced need in hard labour and much diminished likelihood of bodily injuries at work are supposedly positive (virtuous) factors in the loop that strengthens humanity not weakens it; but in fact these factors add to the decadence of humankind (or a majority of the members in the humankind).

Kant was groundbreaking which is incomparable with what I see - those late people I am hateful to see. Hume, the great Scottish skeptic, proved that the law causality is not analytic, which inferred tht we could not know for certain of its truth. Kant accepted it is synthetic but it is known a priori.

There has only been one Christian. He died on the Cross.

Why is Nietzsche so attractive to someone like me? First of all, who is 'someone like me'? I am a complex person and am not prepared to permit myself to admit I am a certain type of person. I am far from a philosopher, for I have not developed a philosophical system or destroyed one (like Nietzsche), and I am not keen to become a philosophy scholar, who spends all day in the university, delving into what has been delved into for innumerable times. Well, this term does not equal the scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages who made groundbreaking suggestions - think of St. Anselm's Ontological Argument and St. Thomas Aquinas' Cosmological Argument. St. Augustine of Hippo's predestination affected followers and non-followers profoundly; if you look at Calvin's predestination doctrines, you will know what I mean. A philosophy scholar is likely to make one associate him with a mediocre mind these days, despite the fact that the chances are, we would find a dozen of brilliant minds at Cambridge and Notre Dame, not to mention the large numbers of liberal arts colleges in the US. The 'someone like me' becomes hard to grasp, if I am just a layman with great interest in philosophy but have no credentials to support either I am a philosopher or a philosophy scholar. A layman merely with great interest means everything but a poet without composing a single poem (paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre's words), and unlike Tony Blair, it seems I do not have a third way to proceed. Then, the only way out would seem to be either to develop a system or destroy one. I am complex because I believe in systematisation, for a system makes arguments easy to follow and hard to breakthrough (if properly deduced). However, obviously systems tend to be contrived and are prone to errors so I believe in pulling down systems as much as I like building them. Destruction of a system is not as easy as one might think, as the works of Nietzsche had well demonstrated. Pulling down an institution of belief is not easy but I guess it could be done with reasonably high probability. But the most difficulty part is - how to replace the institution refuted without adding back just another institution. It was the question Nietzsche was forced to confront after he proposed that God was dead. I do not have the intellectual capability and valour to confront this grand question. The 'someone like me' could be exemplified by a generalised term, of course, a consequence of systematisation, which reads, 'one who is prepared to amplify, to the farthest extent, one's life, and leap out of the morality framework, and define one's own good and evil. This sounds neat and simple, fully appreciable and totally passable. However, for the 'someone like me', it is entirely complex, since it involves something intertwined together with the deepest concerns at its ultimate level - life, morality, good and evil. These are very complicated elements which defy simple explanations.

Having said that, I like Nietzsche not only because he is groundbreaking but also because he is up to the point when our world headed to decadence. He felt it necessary to reassess the values, travesty in fact, obscenely created by Christianity. He detested Christian morality as much as secular morality. The revaluation of all values was his last words. We shall never know what this is all about. But I shall be likely to appreciate how this may lead to. His distaste to institutional Christianity does not mean that he abhorred Christ, for he said, there had been only one Christian, but he died on the Cross. At the time this Christian died, the 'Evangel' became 'Disangel'; and good news turned bad. This is absolutely appreciable when the institution of Christianity began to take shape in the shadow of Roman persecution, the essence of Christ had transformed, or transubstantiated, in much the same way as the bread and wine to the flesh and blood, into something apparently different from what was expected of from the apostolic perspective and substantially incompatible with Christ's original teachings. Nietzsche noted it well.  I like Nietzsche because like Jesus, he stood firm on the new ground he built.  By overthrowing religion, he created the Superman, for he claimed, man is something to be overcome.  We are weak and frail, bound by evils such as morality, compassion and love of the weak man. Superman is here to overcome the weakness, to save the good from the bad morality. I like him because primarily and frankly I am a weak man but with the mind to become a strong man.  I daresay I am prepared to take the good out of the bad morality; and I am ready to reassess the values conveniently built upon the morality we take for granted.  I am complicated not in the sense I speculate profoundly on subjects that puzzle men of wisdom for thousands of years, not that I have on my mind a system as colossal as the Hegelian one. Instead I am as simple and open-minded in my thoughts as I am adamant in my will to disentangle life-long concerns of my own.