The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years – Clive James

If I could invite anyone over for dinner then I might ask Clive James. He is a funny man. This memoir is about his years on the idiot box. He talks about the people he worked with, the people he interviewed, and the various shows he put on. Being famous for his television work belies his ability as a writer. I very much enjoyed this book which I listened to as an audiobook narrated by the author. This is what Clive had to write about The Blaze of Obscurity on his website clivejames.com:

The Blaze of Obscurity
Though it always courts tedium to be precise about numbers, in this case the statistics tell a story. The fifth volume of my unreliable memoirs, The Blaze of Obscurity, covering my years in television between 1982 and 2000, had a publication date (October 7, 2009) timed to coincide with my 70th birthday. It would have been a pretty good stratagem for saying “not dead yet” if the book had not been sent to join a full fifty other brand-new showbiz autobiographies released for the Christmas season. So there I was, toe to toe with Alan Titchmarsh, and neck and neck with Katie Price if I was very lucky. In fact the only advantages I had over the latter candidate were (a) I wrote my book myself, and (b) my breasts were real. But with the help, perhaps, of a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week serialisation, my latest offering escaped instant burial, and even attracted some serious reviews, which I proudly append – proudly because, against all likelihood, I actually try to make this apparently frivolous form a vehicle for what little wisdom I might have managed to acquire.

The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction – William Doyle

France was going bankcrupt thanks in no small part to their absolute monarch who was too fond of going to war. A meeting of the Estates was called in May 1789. The Estates consisted of three groups: the nobility, the clergy, and everyone else in France. This last group was known as the Third Estate. Abbe Sieyes wrote a famous pamphlet about the Third Estate in which he said:

What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something.

On 17th June the Third Estate declared themselves the National Assembley and that they were now in power. The King closed the building where the were due to meet, so the Assembley went to an indoor tennis court which they promised not to leave until they had written a constitution. Tensions grew over the next few days and Paris was consumed in riots and carnage. The insurgents over threw the Bastille prison, which only had seven occupants at the time, but was long considered a symbol of monarchist tyranny.

The Assembly made changes quickly. They abolished feudalism, abolished the Church’s right to tax crops, and confiscated the Church’s property. This last action helped them rescue France from it’s massive debt. The Assembly also published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This affirmed the natural rights of man to liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression. It eliminated aristocratic privileges by proclaiming an end to exemptions from taxation. It provided freedom and equal rights for all men and access to public office based on talent. The monarchy was restricted, and all citizens were to have the right to take part in the legislative process. Freedom of speech and press were declared, and arbitrary arrests outlawed.

This would have been an amazing time to live through.

1984 – George Orwell

A dystopia is a world in which the conditions of life are miserable – wide spread poverty, disease, violence, oppression, and war. This is the world that Winston Smith inhabits in the year 1984. This world is controlled by The Party and it’s seemingly omnipotent leader Big Brother. The Party monitors all behavior via telescreens.

Winston is very frustrated and yearns for a world in which he can act and think what he likes. He has an affair with Julia, who has sympathy with his point of view. Winston’s thought-crimes eventually catch up to him, and he falls into the trap of one of The Party’s inner circle. He is taken to The Ministry of Love where is brutally tortured. He is re-educated about The Party and reality. Winston finally succumbs to the brain-washing and learns to love Big Brother.

This novel is designed to warn of the dangers of totalitarian regimes.

Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals – Immanuel Kant

This is heavy. Kant is after “nothing more than the investigation and establishment of the supreme principle of morality“. Kant says moral philosophy cannot have any emperical basis, it must be based on pure reason. Laws founded on principles devised through experience, which may seem universal, cannot be called moral law. The only thing that can be considered to be moral, without qualification, is a good will. Kant reiterates a point that I often read – that all virtues are not virtues in and of themselves. Courage, humour, beauty, wealth etc, are all nice things, but can’t be considered good without good will.

Moral philosophy gives laws a priori to mankind as we are rational beings. Thus reason is the ultimate nature of our will. Reason is a purpose far nobler than just happiness. To secure one’s own happiness is important, but only in the sense that a discontentment with one’s conditions can lead to a greater temptation to transgression of reason. The notion of happiness is altogether empirical, as it is only based on our experiences. Try as we may we cannot act on definite principles to secure happiness. The ideal of happiness is not based on reason, but on imagination.

We all have desires and fears, inclinations and aversions, pleasures and pains, but it is our reasoning that should determine the morality of our actions. Kant believes an action done from reason derives it’s moral worth not from the outcome, but from the principle of volition by which the action has taken place. In simpler words, it is the intention that counts. Doing the right thing, for the right reason.

Kant says that we must act from respect for the moral law itself. Every motive must come from this position, because that is the condition of goodness. We don’t need philosophy to teach us respect, we just know it.

Kant outlines two types of imperatives – hypothetical and categorical. Hypothetical imperatives are actions which are good in as a means of getting something else. Which leads us to the categorical imperative, or the supreme principle of morality that Kant was seeking. Drum roll please…

Act only on that maxim whereby thou can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

In other words – if everyone did what you are about to do, where would we be? This is the test of the morality of the action you are about to take. This is not to be confused with the reason for the taking of the action. John Stuart Mill misinterpreted Kant this way, by suggesting the categorical imperative was based on consequences like everything else.

Kant also gave the categorical imperative another perspective by saying we must act in accordance to treating humanity (including ourselves) in every case as an end, and never as a means only. As rational humans we are different, we are ends. So if I lie to you, then I am using you as a means for something. I am not respecting your dignity as an end.

My Life – Bill Clinton

I listened to the abridged audiobook version of My Life read by the man himself. The abridged version only ran for six hours. This was probably a good choice. I understand the full version is a hefty tome of a thousand pages which leaves no detail out, such as the name of his childhood barber.

My Life is a candid autobiography. Clinton fronts up about his mistakes and his character flaws. All the world already knows about these, so I guess there is no other position to take. Flawed seems to be the word often attached to his name, along with the words intelligent & charismatic.

A lot of time is given to venting about Kenneth Starr whose pursuit of Clinton following the Monica Lewinsky was a bit nasty. Clinton defends his efforts to capture Osama Bin Laden on his watch. He discusses the ongoing battles he had with the Republicans. And he talks about the terrible supreme court decision that handed George Bush II the 2000 election.

All in all, I found this book to be enjoyable.

Utilitarianism – John Stuart Mill

All action is taken with some end in mind. So it follows that the morality of actions should consider the end to which the action is subservient.

Utilitarianism is based on that precept that all of life is the seeking of pleasure or the avoidance of pain. Seeking pleasure should not be mistaken to merely include that of sensations, but also includes pleasures of intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of moral sentiments etc. Nor is it only about the quantity of pleasure one attains but also the quality. Mill claims that people will prefer the pleasure that engages their higher faculties. The quote below is an excellent defense of being a snob, but I do wonder if it is better to be a fool that is entirely satisfied with their lot in life…

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

The counter-argument to Utilitarianism runs that morality must be deduced based on principles. However, proponents of this school of morality have difficulty outlining their principles, giving their principles an order of priority, or reducing their principles to a first principle. Kant tried.

Other opponents of the the Utilitarianism say that happiness is unattainable, and that people can do without it. These people may follow paths of renunciation or are transcendentalists . But Utilitarianism is not only about the pursuit of happiness, but also the prevention & mitigation of unhappiness. Hill says if happiness is chimerical then the prevention of unhappiness becomes even more important in the equation.

So what kind of happiness is to be aspired for?

The happiness which they meant was not a life of rapture; but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing.

This doesn’t seem to lofty an aim for most of us. It is also important to recognize that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not necessarily a persons own happiness, but that of all concerned. To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.

A few other key points from Hill:

* Although Utilitarianism doesn’t lay down a first principle of morality, it doesn’t suggest that no principles should be laid out to help on the road to happiness.
* Moral feelings are not innate part of our nature, but are acquired.
* Justice is a tricky problem for Utilitarianism, but is no more tricky than any other forms of moral ethics.
Read the book here

Gorgias – Plato

Gorgias is a rhetorician. He contends that rhetoric is the greatest art form. He claims it so because it gives men freedom in their own persons, and to individuals the power of ruling over others in their several states.

Scorates wonders why anyone would listen to a rhetorician on matters where a specialized expert would know more. Gorgias says that an expert without the power to persuade is not much use.

Socrates suggests that rhetoric is not an art at all, but rather an experience in producing a sort of gratification. He says it is a habit of bold and ready wit which knows how to manage mankind. This habit he sums up with the word flattery. He asserts that rhetoric is the ghost of politics. Socrates says that rhetoric aims at pleasure without any thought of the best. He says it is unable to explain the nature of it’s own applications.

Socrates cites medicine as something that is an art form, because a physician will attend to the nature and constitution of the patient, and has principles of action and reason in each case.

I think the essential point Socrates is making is the difference between what is pleasurable and what is good. The good being the better of the two.

Self-Reliance – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quotes from Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;—and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—’Come out unto us.’ But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare.

For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

Is not a man better than a town?

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes

Within the western canon there are certain books that stand apart as being even more significant. The most classic of the classics. Don Quixote is one of these books.

The premise of the story is this. Don Quixote is a middle aged man from La Mancha in Spain. He has an obsession with books of chivalry. This obsession leads him to seek out his own adventures as a knight-errant. He leaves his village with the aim of righting wrongs, rectifying offenses, stopping injustices, and undoing evil. He chooses a local farm girl he barely knows to be his love, not that she is aware of it. He is clearly bonkers. Just how bonkers he really is, is for the reader to ponder as the story unfolds.

Joining Don Quixote in his travels is his squire Sancho Panza. Sancho is not mad like Don Quixote, but he is a bit stupid. Don Quixote promises Sancho that once he has established himself as a great knight who was won many kingdoms, he will give Sancho an island to govern. This promise secures Sancho’s loyalty, even after Sancho realizes the extent of his masters insanity.

And so begins their many adventures. In his quest to fight injustice Don Quixote repeatedly gets himself and Sancho into deep water. These events are often both comic and tragic. They both get their ass kicked on numerous occasions.

I found the short stories of the minor charcters, such as that of Anselmo and Lothario, to be the real highlights. These stories made a nice reprieve from the somewhat repetitive main story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Edith Grossman translation

Julius Caesar – William Shakespeare

So far I have read two of Shakespeare’s tragedies and one comedy. Julius Caesar is the first of the histories I have read. In this play Shakespeare accelerates the pace of actual events for dramatic effect. Caesar himself doesn’t feature to much in the play, with Brutus and Cassius being the central figures.

Cassius is envious of Caesar’s god-like status. He recruits the respected Brutus as a conspirator against Caesar. Brutus has no personal qualms with Caesar, but is most concerned about what he might do as emperor: “The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power…”

The conspirators meet one stormy night at Brutus’ place to discuss their plan. They discuss whether they should kill Mark Antony (Caesar’s right-hand man) as well as Caesar. Brutus says no, as it would be to bloody. He wants to ensure their cause is seen by the people as necessary and not driven by envy. Their plot comes to fruition and Caesar is assassinated. His final words, “Et tu, Brute?”

Afterwards Brutus stands before a throng of citizens and claims that what he did was not because he loved Caesar any less, but because he loved Rome more. Brutus claims Caesar’s ambition meant that the people would have been worse off under his rule. Brutus exits and Mark Antony takes the stage where he begins with the immortal words “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”.

A post-Caesar power struggle begins. In the end Brutus is defeated in battle and he kills himself. On finding Brutus’ body Mark Antony says:

This was the noblest Roman of them all; all the conspirators save only he did that they did in envy of great Caesar; he only, in a general honest thought and common good to all, made one of them. His life was gentle, and the elements so mix’d in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’