rowland manthorpe dot com

I reviewed this about two months ago for the Literary Review and have been “getting round” to posting it up ever since. Productivity reaches a new high.

Robert Rowland Smith is a consultant,writer and teacher with a great middle name. His book seems to be being received well, although it did get an enjoyably vicious review in the Observer, from Theodore Dalrymple:

No thought is too banal for Rowland Smith; unfortunately, his banality is perfectly compatible with error. He rarely loses an opportunity to suppress what is true and suggest what is false.

Funny, but harsh. I thought this was a case of “wrong reviewer, wrong book.” Dalrymple - a bit of a gun - seemed almost offended to be asked to review a work of popular philosophy. He attacked the form and genre, rather than the content, and gave little impression that he had actually read beyond the table of contents.

Reviewing is an immanent art. It works best when it adapts to the goals and conventions of its subject (while bearing in mind the genre, of course). Smith’s book is far from perfect. But Dalrymple’s review was the equivalent of criticising Woolf for failing to develop minor characters or Powell for lacking gripping plots.

You can read my effort (the original, not the cruelly cut Literary Review version) after the jump.

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Can a nation lose its self-confidence? Stephanie Rozes, a French political analyst, believes that it can:

The French say that now they are happy, but when you ask them about the future they are pessimistic. They feel they are not in control of their destiny. For the past 15 years, the French have been convinced that tomorrow will be worse than today. They want to conserve the present.

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I’ve got a piece on confidence and unemployment in the new issue of the RSA Journal. It starts with this little anecdote, which seems to me pretty representative:

Earlier this year, NatWest surveyed 9,000 young people about their salary expectations. The gloomy economic forecasts seem to have influenced the respondents, because their expected average earnings fell from last year’s estimate. Instead of saying they would be earning £70,000 by the time they were 35, they modestly anticipated £54,000. The average salary for a 35-year-old is £23,893.

The article was written in response to a piece on the recession by David Blanchflower, a former member of the Monetary Policy Committee. It’s well worth reading, especially if you need cheering down; you can also ask him a question. My question will being with a long, drawn-out scream.

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Plato famously described the mind as a chariot, an analogy that has been set up and knocked down more times than Ricky Hatton. Its critics rarely offer a persuasive replacement, however, so it’s interesting to read the late Sir Stuart Hampshire’s very different explanation:

Let it be accepted that we have to borrow the vocab that is to describe the operations of our minds from the vocab that describes the public and observable transactions of social life. The picture of the mind that gives substance to the notion of practical reason is a picture of a council chamber, in which the agent’s contrary interests are represented around the table, each speaking for itself.

The chairman, who represents the will, weighs the argument and the intensity of the feeling conveyed by the arguments and the intensity of the feeling conveyed by the arguments, and then issues an order to be acted on. The order is a decision and an intention, to be followed by its execution. This policy is the outcome of debate in the council chamber.

This analogy is intended to reinforce Hampshire’s contention that the natural place for moral judgements is in deliberation. He writes:

It has been a mistake of moral philosophers in the tradition of British empiricism to concentrate attention on the judgements we make as criticisms of the behaviour of others, or on comments that we may make on our own past conduct.

Also a recurrent error in much modern psychology.

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A search for Derrida + aporia usefully led me to credit reports and stomach fat. And - in the Google ads - 7 Powerful Master Witches:

Real witches casting real spells - for you.

Thank you internet. I’m sure Jacques would have approved.

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The last episode of Alone in the Wild is tonight. The incredible Ed Wardle continues his journey into the Yukon wilderness, while we watch his beard grow and his stomach shrink and ask ourselves why he ever agreed to do this. I’ll never read an adventure book the same way again.

One thing that’s amazed me throughout is Ed’s psychological resilience. In the last episode he convincingly told us (I paraphrase):

My chest hurts, my legs hurt, I’m hungry and sore. My pack is rubbing against my back. But I’m happy. I’m happy.

In his award-winning book Stumbling on Happiness, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains one reason for this:

We might think of people as having a psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness. This metaphor is unusually appropriate. The physical immune system must strike a balance between two competing needs: the need to recognise and destroy foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria, and the need to recognise and respect the body’s own cells.

If the physical immune system is hypoactive, it fails to defend the body against itself and we are stricken with autoimmune disease. A healthy physical immune system must balance its competing needs and find a way to defend us well – but not too well.

ps. More prosaically, for those wondering why Ed’s so obsessed with salmon, the answer is here.

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It looked great on paper, but I found 500 Days of Summer dull and flat. It replaced plot with narrative trickery and effective characterisation with set-pieces stolen too blatantly from other films (this was good, but it was nothing on this).

I was also slightly irritated by the overall theme, but I think that was just because the dynamic was reversed - ie. in this case it was happening to the bloke. When I thought about it, every romantic comedy I’ve seen in the last few years (more than I care to admit) has had pretty much the same motif. Hollwood rom-coms have stopped doing “rags to riches”: their big transformation is now “shy to confident”.

Susie Scott’s excellent book Shyness and Society, a sociological study of shyness, suggests why this might be the case. Scott argues that shyness is something people have always experience, but that only we have chosen to stigmatise:

It is only since the late twentieth century that shyness has been defined as a failure to assert oneself, to be in touch with one’s feelings and to “be all that you can be”.

The renowned psychologist Phillip Zimbardo’s shyness.com is a classic example of this approach. Its homepage assures us that:

Shyness and social phobia do not have to interfere with achieving professional and interpersonal goals.

The assumption is that shyness is a bad thing - and that confidence is normal.

One consequence of this, Scott says, is that we feel increasingly anxious about our shyness. We feel strongly the demand to be poised, skillful and assertive in our dealings with others, and we are ashamed how little we are “really” like this. As a result, we all secretly feel as if we are faking it.

Where did the demand to be confident come from? Scott pinpoints modern culture:

In many ways, the shy person represents the complete anathema of contemporary Western culture’s “ideal” worker: by appearing to reject the go-getting, team-building, you-can-do-it ethos of the modern office, they pose a silent threat to the goals of an efficient, streamlined service economy and the exploitation of human resources.

Which brings us right back to 500 Days of Summer. Reader, he gets the job.

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Not my normal subject - not by a long way. But back when I had a job (aah those days, how little I miss them), this was what I worked on.

The RSA’s new report, written by leading fund manager David Pitt-Watson and his anonymous helpers, explains how we can solve Britain’s pensions crisis. It’s a big claim. For once, I think, it can be supported.

The basic idea is to take the system of Personal Accounts - proposed by Lord Turner in his report and scheduled to come into being in 2012 - and open it up to private companies:

The pensions system would then begin to look like the energy industry, where a natural monopoly is accessed by a variety of different suppliers who act primarily as sellers. That reform has achieved impressive savings for consumers. By cutting out marketing and persistency costs, this change would be able to do much the same.

Marketing and persistency are the two main costs associated with private pensions. Marketing = the costs associated with selling. Persistency = the costs associated with changing pensions, because each time you do that it costs that bit extra in administrative fees. A scheme like Personal Accounts would remove both those costs by virtue of being compulsory (ok, it’s opt-out, but that should be the same thing). When everyone has to take part, then pensions don’t need selling, and you don’t get switching either.

But Personal Accounts has a problem. It can only take pensions payments under £3,600 a year. The fund management industry demanded this feature when the scheme was set up. They thought that it would prevent Personal Accounts getting off the ground. They were right.

If Personal Accounts can only take payments of £3,600 a year, then anyone who wants to pay more than that will be forced to look elsewhere, including the directors of most companies. This means that firms will have to arrange a dual system of pensions, which will be difficult and inefficient (one reason why experts believe many people may end up opting out). More importantly, it also means that Personal Accounts will be left with the unprofitable low earners, while the lucrative high earners go elsewhere. In other words, Personal Accounts is crippled before it even starts.

The RSA report proposes to lift the £3,600 limit by allowing private companies to take customers who want to pay more. If Personal Accounts go ahead, this might be the plug-in they need to function successfully. The question is: will a new government be able to resist cutting this gargantuan scheme that is certain to prove unpopular, at least initially, for employers and workers alike? In an era of “tough choices“, that might prove just that bit too easy.

UPDATE (23.09.09): From the FT’s coverage of the report:

David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said on Tuesday that if his party wins the general election it will want to review personal accounts, and Nigel Waterson, the party’s pensions spokesman, said the report is “a well-informed, well-argued document” which he looked forward to discussing further.

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Issue 8 of Meat Magazine is out now in high-quality newsagents and Borders nationwide. It’s got a short story from yours truly illustrated by the ingenious Richard Merrick (that’s his penis below those are his pants below; the penis is here, along with Merrick’s other illustrations. I’d like to thank my legal team for their hard work on my behalf).

The story’s called The Birds and The Beasts and it’s a comic recounting of a filth-ridden night out, with reflections on The Game and evolutionary psychology. To tempt you, here’s the first paragraph:

A bird is a chick is a doll is a babe is a girl (although never a woman). And the beasts? We are the beasts. Come to eat you up like so many late-night kebabs.

How can you resist?

UPDATE: Looks like Merrick’s got a blog. Regular updates on his anatomy there, for those who just can’t get enough.

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Tonight at 8.30, to be precise. Can’t wait. I’m backing Calzaghe.

ps. Putting this up in no way implies support for Tess Daly. When you watch her, ask yourself this: is she secretly wishing she could push Brucie over?

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