I've gone fishing

Well, not really. I'm in Oxford, teaching for Berkeley for three weeks at Merton College and loving it, though I'm in London at the weekends. I'll be back sooner or later, full time and will be posting intermittently on the usual things after what may be my punctuated break. I hope that both my readers, including the one demented one, are having a great Summer, since we are all, of course, doomed. Well, eventually. I'm not doomed yet and nor is anyone I care about.

The picture comes from a person called s-tiger and can be found here.

The Declaration of Independence, 1970s Style

The Luxemburger Anarchist has put this video up, along with a post in English. I do not have time to deal with his somewhat limited vision of American republicanism as purely radical or popular, but I do like the idea of a sort of Bay-City Roller version of the script. Enjoy, I'm off to the gym!

The Summer of Economic Theories : The Elliott Wave

I descended rather appropriately during a spare few hours last Friday to the Radcliffe Science Library's Reading Room in Oxford. It's literally buried away beside the Natural History Museum, a Deane and Woodward folly that goes well beyond what the contemporaneous Houses of Parliament architects would allow.

Approaching it is a little like potholing. One enters through a door set in a corner, into a newly-refurbished reception area, and then descends to a strange, cool sixties-style cavern beneath the ground. The launch area is light, and airy, and completely deceptive. It's like finding a fruit stand or a food hall beside the Cheyenne Mountain complex.

The Library is an odd space. At Racine, Wisconsin, in a building that dates from the thirties, Frank Lloyd Wright created a forest of concrete. He used 'dendriform' columns, which always make me think more of mushrooms than trees, to create a sort of modernist forest as the main room of the S.C.Johnson and Son Administration building (the 'Johnson Wax' HQ). The Lankester room makes me think of nothing so much as the sumps and caves and roots that must be below such a room, but laid out in chrome and concrete. Here are traps, and cracks, and places beneath to earth to squeeze past, and there are odd, movement activated lights that add to the atmosphere.

It was finished in 1975, and is one of Jack Lankester's more successful additions to Oxford. It is younger than me.

I was down there, with a few strained looking graduates, some quietly efficient librarians, and a couple of people who looked as though they were retaking something, to read Robert Prechter's book on The Elliott Wave.

Hence a slight fraud on my part. I had wanted to look at alternative economic theories, but in fact was starting off with a tendentious item of financial mechanics. Prechter makes great claims for it; the wave principle in markets and human behaviour that he has elaborated from Elliott's mid-thirties work on stock markets has, after all, made him a great deal of money. His book, which seeks to establish a 'new science' of socionomics compares itself to the Principia Mathematica of Newton.

That's not all, of course. Just like the Principia, the book seems to have emulsified a little whackiness as it rose through the mental waters. Between pages nine and eighty three, at odd points, Prechter compares his theory to a dodgy analysis of Stonehenge, appears to push an explanation for the 'real' identity of Shakespeare that most scholars don't agree with, and promotes as fact a psuedoscientific and now discredited argument that the Nevada Indians at Massacre Lake wrote Sanskrit in Libyan script.

Creative people are somewhat latitudinarian in their associations and there's no law against entertaining yourself with asides like those. Nor is Prechter actually claiming to be an historian. Things like that do matter, however, if you are attempting to describe a serious financial theory which is now prescribed as part of professional exams in London and New York. They hit needlessly at credibility and undermine the brief. I tutted and set them aside, conscious that here, under the outsized TARDIS-style roundels of the ceiling, that I was not exactly in Kansas anymore.

Elliott wave theory is based on the idea that the Fibonacci sequence can be used to plot a limit to wave behaviour. If one steps back from the 'random walk' of the efficient markets hypothesis, what it is essentially saying is that the behaviour of people in markets, and possibly elsewhere, can be described in terms of a five-step sequence which is fractal. That means that, at the 'minute, minuette, and subminuette' levels, activities and behaviours run in the same shape as they do at the level of Grand supercycles that could last years.

I thought of Paracelsus at this point, and his medieval concern for microcosm, the order of the heavens reflected in the behaviour of the ants. Like the idea of ether, some outlooks, possibly because the brain finds them comforting in ways that we do not yet understand, just will not go away--despite the evidence of reason. Then again, as our Orthodox brethren would say, perhaps western rationalism is just one way of getting from the truth to a complex elaboration and back again, a circle of Niti-grit and Nyaya.

Wave theory posits that markets are not random, but that they only look so because we look at them with the mathematics of physics rather than of biology. It holds that;

an unconscious herding impulse impels social mood trends and changes that are specifically patterned according to a natural growth principle...which is in turn the engine of cultural expression and social interaction

By understanding the compulsions arising from self-similar formology, one can, in a sort of glass bead game way, then plot where markets are going and where society is going.

Really, what is it with social scientists and their ilk? What? Disrespect? I recall sitting in the upper balcony of the cinema on Magdalen Street watching Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins on the stage, presenting trite Cartesian and Augustinian ideas to people under the cleaned-up glow of 'genetic research' that revealed 'epistemological truths'. If they'd respected the past more and bothered to crack open some of the great works of western philosophy, riddled though they may be by religion, they would have saved themselves a great deal of time. In Pinker's case he could have improved his writing style too.

Wave theory struck me as a sort of self-validating melange of Asimov's invented psychohistory, and recursive astrology. Simon Forman, when astrologising to great profit in London in the seventeenth century, was an acute observer who was able to tell people that he could indicate what the future could hold before it happened. He wasn't silly enough to present his insights and instincts raw. The clear and rational way his mind probably understood things was instead dressed it up in an astrological language lined with escape hatches. When the future happened, for a fee, he could explain it for you or you could even give his predictions a meaning yourself.

The Elliott Wave might be built around with a power law, a sense of fractals, and a neat naturalistic analogy of spiral growth--it might even kick off all sorts of productive connexion with your Burkean 'instinctive understanding'--but it cannot tell you what is going to happen until it has happened It is therefore recursive, tautological even, rather than predictive. It is not falsifiable. It is not science. One may as well look to Aristotle's idea of essences to explain gravity--and this from a new Principia Mathematica!

I resisted sneering. Sneering isn't useless, but in my experience it usually indicates that a prideful fall is fairly close at hand. Life has a way of showing to others the chump that one occasionally can be, so I ploughed on.

I learned many things. Pentagram angles are expressed on a Fibonacci basis; sunflower kernels spiral in two directions, with one following on from another in a Fibonacci way even though both sets of spirals exist simultaneously in one set of seeds. I learned that human markets and activities and everything should be viewed in relation to the golden mean, that Phi was as important as Pi. I learned a new word, arborate, to explain branching and the morphology of robust fractals.

What I did not learn, and I may be at fault here, was why I should take the 'new science' built on top of the elliot wave, seriously. Socionomics has a web and faceboook presence, and purports to offer, for a fee, a new way of understanding the economy. For $24.95, you can turn your 'conventionally received' wisdom on its head, provided of course that you forget that wisdom is learned individually and through tradition, and not downloaded. Of course, if you were really broke and wanted to be taught A-level Jean Baudrillard by marketing men, you could get yourself over to the 'Herd' site for free, or maybe even embrace a bit of Gerald Celente. What you wouldn't do, I suspect, is learn very much. Except from Celente. He's great.

Nothing much except...you would learn two fairly useful things. One is how credulous and naive the shrewd can be, and another is how people in a chaotic market will cling to a way of explaining it that has to their mind some secular validity and to the people who will elaborate it for them. It doesn't beat mass, by a long chalk, but for a proper mass you have to believe in an humble and irrational way, I suppose. You have to believe, before you can understand, but in a proper way.

I mean, what would a Society based on the Elliott Wave look like? An elite playing the glass bead game would add an epicycle here, a supercycle there, every time they got it wrong, until they got enough data in to construct a view of the past that smoothed over randomness with order. It'd look like global warming or carbon schemes or some such nonsense.

Who knows? Maybe its practitioners could be as smart as people who could drive banks and economies into the ground by abusing derivatives, get governments to issue electronic money to pay for their losses, then buy treasury bonds with the money and threaten the governments that they would drop the bonds if the governments didn't take real money away from poor people.

No, that would be too cynical, and anyway, it's happened.

I left the Radcliffe to hear a silly English middle class man berating his child, his life, and his holiday in what were probably unintentionally pompous terms--who uses the word 'wretched' anyway?--and had dinner with a friend of mine.

Two human, timeless things. It was cosy, and cheap, in a nice French restaurant, on the pre-theatre menu. We walked through the parks afterwards. She was beautiful, and funny, and clever, and honest, and we were twenty years younger again, and I didn't care when I dropped a fiver on the breezy train, didn't notice myself sleepy at Paddington, smiled at the nuns climbing the steps to get to Earl's Court on the District Line, and chatted with my girl when I got in, still smiling. I even brought chips.

The day took me away from things; from all those pressures great and small that are complicating my life. You learn things from a day in which you do nothing conventionally productive, since of course I earned nothing for all this. I made love to ideas, and made women laugh, and ate and drank nice things, of course. I whetted an appetite for better thoughts. But--I can't help it, I'm sure Prechter means well--the one thing that I cannot discern in all this is a self-similar fractal elliot wave.

That same day, walking past blackwells as I have done a thousand times before, I discovered Amartya Sen's Idea of Justice. Result.

Jews to Nazis; **** you, we're still here and we can dance

For thus saith the LORD; Sing with gladness for Jacob, and shout among the chief of the nations: publish ye, praise ye, and say, O LORD, save thy people, the remnant of Israel. Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the coasts of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame, the woman with child and her that travaileth with child together: a great company shall return thither. They shall come with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them: I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters in a straight way, wherein they shall not stumble: for I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn. Hear the word of the LORD, O ye nations, and declare it in the isles afar off, and say, He that scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him, as a shepherd doth his flock. For the LORD hath redeemed Jacob, and ransomed him from the hand of him that was stronger than he. Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the LORD, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd: and their soul shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at all. Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance, both young men and old together: for I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow.-- Jeremiah 31

The following video, which was posted by Jane Korman on youtube, shows an Australian Jewish family. Their patriarch was imprisoned, apparently at Dachau and Auschwitz, sixty three years before the film was taken. He survived. They returned, and danced on the Nazi's monument to hatred and inhumanity. Dachau was the product of European social science, supported by a scientific consensus; Auschwitz is unimaginable without European civilisation's shameful history of antisemitism, and I include the Church, obviously, in that.

The video is almost completely offensive to pompous sensibility. I find it a monument to the human spirit. Jane has put pictures of other Jews dancing, though none (understandably) of the other victims of Hitler's sickness, on her channel here. Her uploads include a beautiful video set to a Leonard Cohen song that made me cry. You can see it at the second link below.

The Summer of Alternative Economic Theories

There is clearly something wrong with economics as it is taught and practised, even if products of the University of Iowa working in minor parts of the federal reserve system think that it is too clever for most people to understand.

Over the past thirty years, physics-based mathematics, aided and abetted by highly limited formulae of correlation, and a good deal of self-interested bull, have characterised the profession's appearance to an increasingly befuddled public. A pantheon has been created, stretching from Adam Smith and David Ricardo through Leon Walras and Alfred Marshall and beyond.

This pantheon has been sweetened (if that is the appropriate word) by the moral and intellectual efforts of non-economists, like Friedrich Hayek, and by a determined rejection of the Keynesian settlement. This pantheon has then been all but worshipped, and whole professional and academic careers have been built upon its purported ideas, despite the economic ruin into which a good part of the world is sinking as a consequence of following them.

In the abstract, however, it is very difficult to argue with the theories that underlie economic policy in the west. That isn't just because of the domination of the engines of power and influence by liberals; it is also because of their intellectual strength. How does one deal with people who have an answer for everything which seems, at least on the face of it, utterly rational?

Modern physiocrats, as good ideologues, point to models based on the maximisation of utility by the self-interested, rational individual, and the mathematicisation of the behaviour of that individual as unarguable. If one accepts the premises of diminishing returns, comparative advantage, and the insuppresable nature of the price mechanism and markets, one cannot argue against liberal economics logically. You can cavil; you can point to flaws and misunderstandings; but you have ultimately to reject their view of human nature and start again if you want to get away from the marketeers, and the record of people who try to do so has not been a good one.

That's a powerful thing that the economic liberals have on their side--the failure and human cost that has been created by attempts to reject, through governmental means, their orthodoxy. I wonder how much of this was the result of the political and physical isolation of naysaying countries, and how much the consequence of dirigisme and state action, but that's a post for another day.

I think that people who are uncomfortable with capitalism and the market as it has developed should expose themselves to theories claiming to be alternatives, in order to assess whether they are or not.

There are, to my mind, at least six candidates for the role, although all of them are in their way flawed. Robert Prechter's elaboration of the Elliot Wave, which he's called Socionomics, seems an obvious one; Erik Reinert's 'other canon' of evidence-based economics another.

A second group of alternatives are the variations on neo-Keynesianism and anti-maths associated with rich men like George Soros and Nassim Taleb, and expressed through their vicars de jour, John Cassidy and Pablo Triana. I've been enjoying their works, and have written a little bit about them already. I haven't found them fully satisfactory, but I suspect that's because they tend to argue negatively, and I've missed any positive suggestions.

Both groups are the products of people who clearly believe in the system at hand, but who want to change its focus. I suppose that the proper metaphor is religious; somewhere between an old unknowing and a new belief, some economists create way stations in which to wait out their failures before a rebalancing. A bit like Obi-Wan hiding out beyond the Dune Sea, but with an expense account from Bail Organa.


There are two religious traditions that I'd like to get to grips with, too; Islamic finance (especially its modern iteration of 'meccanomics', of which I am highly suspicious) and distributism.

I can't bring myself to wade through various green or socialist traditions, or to dwell on anarchism or libertarianism, but I do want to spend a good bit of the spare time I'll have this summer in the library when I'm not in the gym. I spent last Friday pleasantly in the Radcliffe Science Library in Oxford--of which more later--, and will be hiding out at the British Library next week. I promise to blog.

If any of my readers have ideas, let's have them. Those who would seek an alternative to whatever capitalism has become can't trade on slogans or fuzzy thinking forever. In a small way, I want to use the time before the west wakes up to how far sunk the boat is thinking about why we got to where we are. For how, well, read any of my posts on the unfolding economic crisis since 2007.

If the crowd of anti-religious, 'class free', hyper-individual ideologues who have a grip on discourse in the western public sector are not challenged, properly, more disasters like the dollar reserve system, the euro as it stands, the national debt, the abuse of derivatives, the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of corporate debt, will flow. They'll steal and tax and burn through money lit only by the righteous and increasingly obvious glow of their own self interest. They'll salivate about exclusion and we'll end up in even bigger resource wars, explained to us by a bought and paid for media and a political class barely worthy of the name.

They'll eat people's lives up in depression and taxes, and when those who did have the time to think clearly were asked, 'why did you ignore it?', all we'll have is the comfort of saying 'I couldn't think of a way to argue with them, and they couldn't be told they were wrong'. That's no place to be at all.

Sex and the City Again

I've been having a facebook discussion with a couple of friends about my mad response to SATC2, and a couple of things struck me.

Firstly, it's actually The A-Team on Oestrogen--a manipulative combination of mad/angry/calculating/lusty characters set to incidental music and a slightly mindless plot. Secondly, it strains to be good--Carrie/SJP does see that the wealth she experiences is based on Indian slavery in the UAE, and tries to remedy it with money and arbitrary charity. But that does nothing to address the iniquity, really (though I am sure that SJP thought that it showed Carrie's practical compassion). Thirdly, the film, as I thought, is of a piece with the late American republic; in it, gay marriages imply fidelity so long as a communally recognised legality is given to them. A film that could contain observations like that isn't selfish (thats the lazy thing to say) so much as the product of a bankrupt society that has lost its moorings but remembers what good was. It's the product of accelerated Protestant dissipation injected into liberal jewish people in post-Catholic New York. God almighty, there's a cocktail for you.

You could take a different approach, I suppose; the ladies could represent America. Carrie ends up dependent on a banker who hearkens back to the nineteen thirties, whilst Samantha ends up getting screwed between Europe and the car industry. Meanwhile, Miranda and Charlotte get drunk from glasses modelled on Marie Antionette's breasts.

TS Eliot said something about cheap tunes, once, to which I can add the observation that really stupid films sometimes make you think. I actually think that I ended up liking this one, though the consensus amongst me and my facebook friends is that it should have more religion, guns, and car chases in it to make it really watchable.

I've gone and got a bit interested in football too, since the world cup was on and the England hype finished. God help this blog when I get back from the gym.

PS I have not been going on like this to my girlfriend or anyone else, just so that you know. The image my one demented reader has of me shouldn't really include the notion that I hang around Gregg's pie shop muttering about the relationship of meccanomics and New York Sex. That, after all, is what my blog is for....

Sex and the City 2 and the Scholastic tradition of Thomas Aquinas

The picture is The Abduction of Psyche, by Bouguereau.

My girlfriend has been a bit unter druck lately (as have I, for different reasons), so I have been cooking and being entertaining and so forth, to at least the extent that a fat old man can be. I did quite a nice porcini risotto and southern fried chicken the other night, though I do say so myself.

Anyhow, thought I, how does one help the sophisticated modern Korean woman to slum it? When she suggested a trip to 'Sex and the City Two' (me having seen the various series and the previous film, not wholly against my will) I thought, well, why not?. The Premier chairs at the Odeon in Putney aren't bad, no one will be there, and provided I nod at the right moments, don't choke on the credit-fuelled sentiment, and buy toffee popcorn rather than a couple of big hot dogs with mustard and tomato sauce, what can go wrong?

What indeed.

Etienne Gilson and Leo XIII had, no doubt (as such men do) a great deal to answer for. One of the things that they proclaimed, as Alan Fimister's great book on Robert Schuman reminded me last year, was that a decent civil order was inconceivable without Christianity, and specifically without the Church. Oddly enough, it is possible to read the idea in a republican way; after all, St Thomas, Bellarmine and others have all argued that the most decent civil order, because it is the most realisable, is a state that balances various forms of government with the people as the source of God's authority but the law, the government, and the oligarchies as a check on the human elements that might lead to badness.

Sex and the City 2 seems determined to argue the opposite--to construct a completely godless, binding, but semi-relativistic ethical code for living based on indulgence, narcissim, the body, and a huge amount of pretend money that very very few watching could ever really have. It's also oddly solipsistic, rather than racist, with every non-American character forced into some mad nineteenth century plastic identity. Where on earth was the accent of the braless nanny from, I asked myself very briefly, before remembering to look at the popcorn. In those moments when I realised that people would watch this sort of thing and take their cue from it--since it seemed to act, twitter like, as a fount of one-liners as much as anything else--it was as if Reggie-Marie Garrigou-Lagrange worked in vain.

This was one of the many thoughts that I had whilst necking far too much of the exploded, sugared bounty of the Prairies. The film was faintly annoying wallpaper, though it was well plotted. America has clearly fallen into some sort of timewarp somewhere between 480-520AD and 1783-7. Perhaps, as the world cools, we are aping the onset of the two previous little ice ages--maybe something magnetic happens to our brains. Birds go South, and why shouldn't we? If we did, would the chemical soup of a woman's brain react more or less slowly than the testosterone-addled mind of a man?

Sarah-Jessica Parker's confection manages to be late Roman, corrupt, trivial, and so stupid it actually inspires intellectual questions. It's as though H.L.Mencken's Warren Harding--characterised by vast legions of prose bloviating over the landscape in search of meaning--had actually been distilled into a sort of aneurysm fluid. It's gnostic, in a way. Everyone in the film worships the body whilst claiming that they are something more and separate inside, as though they belonged to some Marcionite or Arian sex heresy.

That was just me being pretentious. By this point, I was downing a bucket of diet pepsi and thinking about making a paella later.

The film seems to attempt to follow a feminist and late-republican agenda in American life, and rests on a set of somewhat relativist, finance-soaked ethics that have absolutely nothing to do with religion, and tedious drolerie. It namechecks (in order) gay 'weddings' (and I don't know how Liza Minelli was photoshopped to get into those positions), arrested development, ingrained sexism in the workplace, the terror of the menopause, the need for escape from the economy, the medievalism of the levant, and the misogyny of conservative Muslims seeking only to suppress women who wish to wear the creations of sundry homosexualists of Mediterranean extraction.

It wasn't hard to smile at the right, telegraphed moments, and I did. The film is rather enjoyable escapism, but its the tedious middlebrow stupidity of it that makes me wonder. It seems to know that it is not as good a diversion as the last depression produced--Philadephia Story it isnt--partly because Chris Noth ('Mr Big') references Cary Grant so much. But he lumbers, where Grant danced, and he knows it. SJP even makes him take away the TV screen in the bedroom where he planned to watch old screwball comedies, as though the writers sense it too.

It's difficult to imagine any of the four women, bar the formerly obnoxious Miranda, making it anywhere near the screen seventy years ago, and I mean that as a comment on their acting. Really, imagine what Ida Lupino could have done with Samantha's essentially transexual old boiler, and Kirsten whatsherface can't make up her mind if she is a pastiche of Lauren Bacall, and Audrey Hepburn or just some National Lampoon version of a preppy tart.

Julie Nixon* is the only one of the TV crew who seems to have grown into something remotely sympathetic, which is odd, because she plays her role in the style of an annoying postgraduate lawyer in an Ivy League hothouse. I have experience of such women, who tend to reach for the empowering bourgeois self-pity that androphobic feminism is even more often than handmade sweets and lentil curries. Now that she has calmed down a bit, she's developing a fit with Angela Lansbury. I'd still avoid her uncomfortable, annoyed silences when she worked out that a) I wasn't a middle class liberal and b) I wasn't digging her driveway, by, well, looking, though.

Sex and the City Two pushed me beyond--mir_rovecha, my korean phrase of the day--Gilson into Maritain and Leo. Some theologians, the present Pope amongst them, believe that the Church is not just right, but more right than other systems. That is to say, the Church is given by God the deposit of the faith, the past exegetical and theological patrimony of the Christian tradition, but also embodies the Platonic truths of God to which it has been exposed. In their eyes, others may be less right but on the right track; other ethical systems may allow things to tick along. Other systems could, therefore be systems of morality, if more wrong.

That laid out in SATC2 won't. It is not only empty, it is not only tired, but it beautifully exists as one side of the sort of Dionysian, look-at-me coin that flips over into Suicide bombers. It has even less of a future than paper money. In the face of this stuff, I felt like Charles Maurras, which is not a comfortable place to be since he was, obviously, a big old far right nutcase.

I did like the New York tune at the start of the film, and the way the opening credits slipped between John Hughes' Cathedral, Al Smith's folly, and the Chrysler building made me smile.

I can't wait for The A-Team, which obviously I will visit alone.

*I realise that I meant 'Cynthia Nixon', not Julie Nixon there. But, well, there isn't a part of my mental lake that the late President isn't lurking beneath sometimes. I think that there is something Lacanian to the whole deal.

Happy Independence Day, Americans

I have been alternately busy and on a sort of mini-holiday lately, and frankly depressed enough by the news and the wilful stupidity of large numbers of people not to want to blog. However, I thought that I would break the duck of the past few weeks, as it were, with some holiday wishes! Bonnes vacances everyone....