New Journalism

So there's this thing called journalism. I quite like it, it's useful for news and investigations and... stuff but at some point in the 60s at a time of political and social upheaval a group of journalists changed how journalism works (sort of... but we'll get on to that). Tom Wolfe wrote a book called The New Journalism but this doesn't mean that he started the movement because the majority of the book was a collection of new journalism articles. My knowledge of new journalism really comes from the Gonzo Journalism of Hunter S. Thompson who was not the first person to write in a gonzo style but was one of the most successful. His book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which was turned in to a very successful film (especially if we're measuring success by how much Johnny Depp your film has) was a great example of Gonzo journalism as we follow Thompson in the guise of Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo or The Samoan. Thompson was sent to cover two events for Rolling Stone magazine and yet what he actually covered were his and Dr. Gonzo's exploits while off their faces on a cocktail of drugs and probably cocktails. Thompson's only complaint about Fear and Loathing was that it wasn't Gonzo enough; he took events that happened a month or two apart and condensed them into a couple of days. For better examples of gonzo-ness, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is, (according to my friend George whose blog on this is much better as it was his seminar paper and a subject he's passionate about) much better.

New journalism is not strictly an American thing but that is where it comes from. Today new journalism can come from anywhere but it is important when looking at the origins of new journalism to consider American journalism's history. After the creation of wire services like the Associated Press, these companies realised to sell their product of news to other outlets, they needed to be objective, so objectivity became the name of the game in journalism. It was the strict Five W's: Who, What, When, Where and Why. What followed was the Yellow Press. The battle between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (of Pulitzer Prize fame). The struggle between the two was a real power struggle in the US, running emotive headlines with big, striking pictures. There were exclusives, dramatic stories, romantic stories, shocking stories and crime stories; all the same sort of things you'd get in the Sun today. America then in the 60s and 70s felt similar to the time of the Yellow Press. It was a time of great social and political upheaval with Vietnam, the Cold War, Communism and Civil Rights looming over the people of America. Journalists of the time were recording these events in the same formulaic way they had been doing since journalism became a thing that people did, the new journalism was an attempt to record events in a way that mirrored the language and style of the events themselves; let it bleed into the copy. It was a part of the whole anti establishment movement of the 60s and the idea that "there is a policeman inside your head - he must be destroyed," seeped into journalism. The objectivity question came up again as journos questioned whether only basing stories on press releases was really objective. Spoiler alert: it isn't. Interpretive reporting began with journalists like Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer who are examples of the New Breed.

Journalism moved from "seeing" to "telling" as narration in journalism moved from Diegetic to Mimetic; objectivity was junked in favour of subjective experience so as in the previously mentioned Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it was more about Hunter S. Thompson's personal experience in Vegas than it was the events he was sent to cover. This eventually took us to the "Performance Journalism" of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock in Supersize Me and to a lesser extent Louis Theroux. Journalism became a lot more about real dialogue between people. Not just quotes from speeches and interviews but dialogue between people. In the seminar we talked about a hatchet job a journalist in Rolling Stone magazine had done on John McCain in the run up to the presidential election which Obama subsequently won, and in the way that most journalists (myself included) overstate their personal influence, the dialogue between McCain and his wife which did not show him in a particularly good light could have been a deciding factor in the elections.

For now I think we're done with New Journalism. It's not dead but it seems to be far less popular than it was at its zenith. With characters like Michael Moore and Louis Theroux still producing thought provoking content though there could still be hope for a strand of journalism which at one time looked like it was going to take over the world.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Existentialism and (insert witty joke here)

The final lecture of the first semester was on Existentialism, a subject which I found a little difficult to understand at first. I think I now have a grasp on the basic principles but some subjects such as nihilism still stump me. A lot of existentialism comes from Phenomenology, the objective perception of things, one of the best examples of this is Husserl's Duck-Rabbit picture which you can see here. You can only see the duck if you want to see it, and the same with the rabbit; the University of Winchester logo it was pointed out, also has a duck rabbit situation going on, probably inadvertently but you can see first the cathedral, and then if you look again, a little Scottie dog (have a look for yourself). The choice of what we want to see is the fundamental activity of human existence.

One existentialist thinker was Heidegger, a student of the aforementioned Husserl, whose main book: Being in Time, examined how personality changes over time. We constantly look forward to the future, to what's going to happen or be said; but we dread the future, we have a feeling of angst similar to Freud's idea of ordinary misery. Heidegger pioneered the idea of Dasein or being; our dasein keeps us from the dread of the future, so if you're a carpenter you just think to yourself, "I'll keep banging in these nails and it'll be the same next week so I needn't worry about dread."
Time for Heidegger went a little like this: 1. The past - guilt
2. The future - unknown
3. The present - dread
It is our dasein that keeps us from this dread and enables us to carry on. Heidegger though is often criticised for being, well, a bit of a Nazi. In fact he would reject this, as he felt the Nazi's weren't Nazi enough! He wanted a return to nature, a bit like Rousseau but with genocide. He eventually fell out with the Nazi's because they loved technology.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a student of Heidegger, but was a far left thinker. One of the few ideas he took from the far right Heidegger was dasein. His most famous phrase, "Hell is other people", came from his play No Exit. A kind of salvation for Sartre was being brutally honest all the time: he called this good faith. We're doomed in this existential mess, but so is everyone else! Really, you should just let people get on with things, there is no particular way in existentialism for people to live, no real way for people to be. If someones dasein is a priest, you should let them be even if you are an atheist. You've been thrown into this pointless existence at a pointless time, so just get on with it. It's a little bit angst-y but that's how existentialism is.

Finally, I'm going to try and briefly and basically explain nihilism, using the internet. Good old Wikipedia tells us "Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value." Cheers for that Wikipedia, other free to edit encyclopedias are available, probably.

Until Next Time (and next year). Stay Classy Internet.

Total Totalitarianism (geddit?)

The penultimate lecture this year (i.e. before Christmas, we sure as hell aren't done in this year of Uni) focused on the subject of Totalitarianism and both the lecture and the seminar had a heavy focus towards Hannah Arendt's book, Origins of Totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt's approach is like Hume's, she doesn't believe things follow a simplistic order, she believes in causality. Totalitarian regimes believe that everything is possible, they sound positive, but the regimes seek out power of which the inevitable price is destruction of human plurality. To destroy individuality, two methods were used; state terror and ideology. The essence of a totalitarian government is 'total terror', they need to destroy not only the people who are acting out but also the thought to act. Ideology eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves so for example the Nazi's who actually ran the concentration camps and were directly involved with murdering on a daily basis, their excuses stretch to just following orders and the totalitarian ideology frees the mind from the constraints of common sense and reality. Ideology and state terror break down normal social and psychological barriers that set limits on what is possible.

Hannah Arendt sees genocide as logical for a totalitarian state as it is an extension of the trajectory of mass society where meaning is provided by ideology. Genocide isn't an exercise of power for totalitarianism, power grows from a group of people, but it is key to enforcing ideology and is part of the social contract for totalitarian states. Totalitarian states also need a victim, so in the case of the Nazi's, making the Jews stateless and rights-less made them perfect victims. There is no real end to Totalitarianism in Arendt's eyes, the law of killing would continue and remain a law even if all humanity was subject to it.

One case in the world of Totalitarianism that it is worth looking at is the Eichmann case, a series of articles published originally in the New Yorker about a man named Eichmann who was a Nazi and who took part in the holocaust. It poses the question, would you collaborate? Captured by the Israeli Secret Service in Australia in 1960, he was a bureaucrat, involved in the transport of millions of Jews from across Europe to concentration camps which he carried out with zeal and efficiency. Eichmann spoke in court in endless cliches, saying how he was proud of being a "law abiding citizen", distancing himself from his actual crime. This shocked Arendt to see how ordinary he was, this helped her to see the banality of evil. Whilst she agreed in the decision to put Eichmann to death, she did not believe his greatest crime was his part in the holocaust, but that his greatest crime was non-thinking. No thinking man could carry out genocide she reasoned, and although Eichmann claimed he was acting from obedience and his reading of Kant, Arendt refuted this arguing that Kant is all about judgement. You cannot argue that Kant's categorical imperative is any use here as although Kant was all about following the law so society could continue, even if 80 million Germans had done as he did, that would not excuse him for Arendt.

HCJ Economics Lecture - Keynes and stuff

Our lecture and seminar combo for HCJ concerned Economics, a bit of a departure for what has essentially been philosophy until now. Chris started by saying that Schopenhauer believed music made life, as an economist he disagreed saying that it is money which makes life (the world go round). As you may know, economics is a about money... alright that was a bit obvious but I don't know who reads this. It's often referred to as The Dismal Science, a derogatory term for economics devised in the 19th Century by historian Thomas Carlyle. The main problem is economics is this; the more you consume, the more you want. How can economics solve this? Humans don't need anything really, OK so we need to eat and drink to live, but why do we need to do that? To exist we don't need anything, economics ignores needs and focuses on wants. How much you are prepared to pay for something shows a persons wants. So for example, if a piano costs £5000 and Biro costs one pound, why is a piano worth a thousand pens? It doesn't cost that much more to make surely, so it must be because people want it more. Utility is the fundamental, measurable, verifiable phenomena of human wants. It is the measure of satisfaction from a consumer after consuming a good or service. Over time people will try to maximise their utility, as in Utilitarianism.

!!!Now it's time for a quote without context!!!
"There are people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Oscar Wilde

I'm going to put this next note in just as I've written it because I know it's important I just can't remember how it works out. It's an equation.

Y = C + I + G
Household Spending (C)
Investments (I)
Government Spending (G)

If Y decreases (Is Y like the amount of money overall?) then there isn't enough money for people to keep working without pay cuts.

SUPER HAPPY FUN TIME BONUS SEMINAR NOTES!!!

The seminar had a huge focus on Keynes and it was interesting to discuss his theories given the current economic climate. Keynes was an extremely influential economist, so much so that we could all be termed Keynesian. His most crucial innovation was taking apart Say's law, a classical economic principle named after French economist and businessman Jean-Baptiste Say. Essentially the principle was that "supply creates its own demand," but Keynes refutes this. If people save their money then this breaks Say's law. The thing that I remember most from this seminar about Keynes is that he would rather have people just digging pointless holes than have people unemployed; when faced with a depression he wouldn't ask why there is a depression, he'd ask ask how we lower unemployment. He believed that to get out of a recession the government should spend so that the public sector will spend; this is the multiplier effect, if I have £1000, spend 900 and save 100, the next person can save 100 and spend 800 and so on. When economics suffers from low demand, unemployment rises.

You often hear people say of the global debt and recession that "in the long run, this debt is going to have to be paid." Keynes would ask why. Why can't we just keep metaphorically kicking the can down the road? Money isn't real anyway. All a 5 pound note tells you is that it's meant to signify the value of 5 pound. It tells you right there on the note itself that it's worthless, it's just given value by us. So let's kick the can down the road, how about all the wars in the middle east? The USA is Keynesian in its military by knocking down and rebuilding countries like Iraq and Afghanistan every few years. The current economic crisis was caused by borrowing yes, it was caused by banks loaning money they didn't have but this had been happening for years, why not carry on? Liquidity is the technical term for giving people spending money, let's just liquidise? everything in sight. When the Lehman Brothers went bankrupt it wasn't necessarily because they're horrible people, I don't know them personally, it was a chain of mismanaged loans which have mangled the economy. Small banks borrowed from big banks who then borrowed from banks like Lehman Brothers, when the small banks can't pay the big banks their money back, then the big banks have no money to pay to Lehman Brothers. Bust. So then vast amounts of money were printed in an attempt to pretend everything was OK.

I've completely lost track of where I'm going with all this so here's some notes about the credit creation ratio (CCR). If the bank has £100 and the CCR is 1:10 then it can create ten bank accounts with £100. Still following? It's basically just magic. So once this money is gone, the bank goes and borrows money from the government who pay the bonds to cover all of these loans. The economic crash was caused because the CCR was too high. Now that it's been lowered though, no one can get a loan because no one can possibly pay them back.

A sobering end to a blog so here's a picture of some kittens in a barrel. The one of the left's Phillip.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

P.S. Bonus picture: Occupy Wall Street

Philosophy of Language - My 100th Post

My my, has it really been 100 blogs full to the brim with Anchorman references and pseudo intelligent ramblings? Well according to my Blogger, yes it has. Some of these blogs were published and then taken away in a more lucid moment once I'd seen how terrible the writing was, but 100 blogs nonetheless. To continue the trend, here's yet another blog in which I attempt to understand philosophy and boy was this one difficult.

I'm going to throw you in right at the deep end by asking you to think about this statement for a second: 'The present King of France is bald'. May not seem earth shattering on your first look but is the statement true or false? Is it even meaningless? The first thing to consider is that there is no present King of France, making the statement false, but the negation of this statement, 'It is not true that the present King of France is bald' and its logical equivalent 'The present King of France is not bald' are no more true than the original statement, even though that is also false. Some philosophers would suggest this makes the statement meaningless, especially since it fails to refer, even though it seems to mean something we can clearly understand. Confused yet, because by this point in Anthony Kenny's book, my head was spinning. This is without a doubt the hardest philosophy we've had to do so far but it's also one of the most important. The logic that you need to solve problems like this was what gave us the ability to programme today's computers. Whenever your computer crashes, you have to ctrl+alt+delete, you get the spinning wheel of death or the computer just gives up on you, it probably means you asked to do something that it couldn't process logically.

I really enjoyed the seminar this week though as the discussion we had really helped me gain an understanding of the subject. The lecture and the reading only succeeded in confusing me but the examples we used in the seminar, whilst still confusing, definitely helped me. I felt that the most interesting thing whilst looking at the philosophy of language was its influence on the computer world. To think that if we had stuck with the Aristotelian logic of, 'All men are mortal, Aristotle is mortal therefore Aristotle is a man' you wouldn't be reading this blog, and arguably you'd be better off. It helped me understand the sense and reference mode of logic that can make even nonsense statements have sense... yeah exactly, that shouldn't work. The phrase, "The morning star is the same as the evening star" is stupid when viewed logically because the morning star and the evening star are both Venus, however you can understand it. You take the sign and the word and come up with the sense with a reference which is the connection you make in your mind. In works of fiction we force a reference onto things that can have no reference to make them understandable. The meaning of a sentence arises from its structure, the predicate (or an object) gives the subject meaning and then we are able to understand it.

To deal with this sort of logic and the philosophy of language, you can't become hung up on the nominal meaning of words like a school teacher would. You need to be thinking about it with cold hard logic of a computer. The phrase "There is nobody on the road" seems simple enough, but it could mean a whole host of things to a computer, it is not logical enough. If there's nobody on the road does that mean there's somebody? Is it just this road or all roads? This can only work if you say "For all possible roads, on this one there is a man. False." Computers work in true or false, in binary in fact. Phrases like "you're evil" have absolutely no meaning to a computer, first you would have to define what evil is. You need to have the three elements of language (words, grammar and syntax) for a sentence to make any sense at all. The main philosophers of language, Frege, Wittgenstein and Russell all see music as the perfect language because it is logical and has grammar and syntax.

As a final point, a statement becomes truer with the more sources of verification there are so if, as in the seminar, you decide that all people who wear blue shirts are evil (I was wearing a blue shirt, read what you will into that) the statement would need to define what evil was, but if you could do that then you would only need to find more examples of where someone in a blue shirt was evil to make your statement truer. It was AJ Ayres who said "The truth of the statement is the verification." Probably with the italics.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Seminar Paper - Sigmund Freud

Let me make it clear before the paper that I was always a bigger fan of Clement Freud, Sigmund's grandson, for his appearances on Just A Minute, but I guess that's not as relevant to the course.

Sigmund Freud Seminar

This week we’re looking mainly at Sigmund Freud, one of the first thinkers in psychoanalysis. It would be wrong to say he was the founder, as philosophers like Schopenhauer looked at that side of human behaviour before him; but you could say he was the mother, I mean father of the psychoanalytical movement of the late 1800’s and into the 20^th century.

As in last week’s lecture I think one of the most important aspects of Freud’s work to look at is the idea of a tripartite self. Freud looks at human behaviour in much the same way as Plato and Marx but where Plato had reason, spirit and desire as his three parts of the self, with reason controlling desire, Freud saw it as weak because people are irrational. Plato used the allegory of the chariot rider to explain how he saw the self, with desire and the spirit as the horses and reason as the rider, reining them in. I think, seeing the pessimistic way in which Freud tended to approach life, he would either reason as a weak rider, or desire at the reins, driving human behaviour like his Id. More of which later.

Freud’s theories are all encompassing; you cannot just take one aspect, as his psychoanalysis is a theory of everything, or at least it attempts to understand everything. In today’s psychology, Freud has less relevance to its practical application but in the lecture Brian pointed to a quote which sadly I forgot to note down who said it, “We all speak Freud now.” The influence of Freud on popular culture and media, even down to certain rules from society that we now take for granted, is we all have a similar construct now in our minds if we think about a therapist, we see the patient on a couch and some pseudo-Freud character sitting back asking odd questions until suddenly it’s about your mother. It was this, his obsession with infancy and sex being the cause of all psychological traumas that led to a breach with a former colleague Joseph Breuer. It was around this time, in isolation from his medical colleagues, that he published what Anthony Kenny calls the “most important of his works”, The Interpretation of Dreams. In this he argued that dreams were nothing more than neurotic symptoms which were actually a coded expression of sexual desires that we are repressing. The usual assumption here is that once again, as it’s Freud, all interpretations of dreams must be sexual, Freud himself debunked this saying, “The assertion that all dreams require a sexual interpretation, against which critics rage so incessantly, occurs nowhere in my Interpretation of Dreams ... and is in obvious contradiction to other views expressed in it.”According to the citation on the website where I found this quote, it was printed in the back of his 1919 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams.

When it comes to interpreting the pattern of the unconscious mind however, Freud goes back on all the nice things I’ve said and goes straight back to sex, and more importantly sexual development. Yes, we’re getting onto all things Oedipus and phallic. Freud believed sexual development is the key to the pattern of the unconscious mind. He looked at infantile sexuality, something the Daily Mail would get you done for, and concluded that it starts with an oral phase, in which pleasure is focused on the mouth. An anal stage follows, although this is not entirely explained in Kenny’s book. A little focused internet searching and a feeling of gladness that I didn’t just type “Anal Stage” into Google, turned up this “Toilet training is the child's key anal-stage experience, occurring at about the age of two years, and results in conflict between the Id (demanding immediate gratification) and the Ego (demanding delayed gratification) in eliminating bodily wastes.” If you’ve ever really enjoyed dropping the kids off at the pool, then this is why. Thanks Freud! He went on to say that the parental demands put on the child at this stage will affect them later in life. So if the parents make immoderate demands of the child, by over-emphasizing toilet training, it might lead to the development of a compulsive personality, a person too concerned with neatness and order. Toilet training can make you OCD, you heard it here last. We’ve now made it to the phallic stage where the child becomes focused on its genitals where, according to Freud, we suddenly become attracted to our mothers, jealous at our father’s possession of her. This is generally the most ridiculed of Freud’s ideas but he’d probably just say it was an unconscious desire, and the Ego is preventing the Id from getting what it wants. Fortunately for us, (and our mums), our hostility towards our fathers eventually makes us worry that he’ll castrate us, so we abandon any designs we might have on our mothers, (are you freaked out yet?) and gradually identify with our fathers. Freud did recognize that there was almost certainly a feminine equivalent of the Oedipus complex but it was never fully worked out in a convincing manner. I think he was right though, based purely on the fact that his own daughter Anna followed him into psychoanalysis to finish the work he started.

If Freud did anything he helped pioneer a philosophy of mind, he probably wouldn’t thank us for including him in a course where philosophy is the key topic, but like the empiricists he tried to understand everything and so his place here is valid. Freud would have seen himself as a scientist rather than a philosopher although when his theories have been made precise enough to allow for experimental testing, they have been shown to lack foundation. In Kenny’s book he claims that medical professionals disagree how far psychoanalytic techniques are effective forms of therapy and, if they are, where they derive their worth from. Freud has had an enormous effect on society though, in our understanding of mental illness, our appreciation of art and literature, and on interpersonal relationships of many kinds. All of us directly or indirectly have taken in a good deal of psychoanalytic theory. We often, with friends or with family, have talked unself-consciously of repression and sublimation. People who have never read Freud can quite easily identify their own and others’ Freudian slips. Kenny claims that no philosopher since Aristotle has made a greater contribution to the everyday vocabulary of psychology and morality and says that it is hard to fault the judgement of W.H. Auden who mourned Freud’s death in 28 intricate quatrains one of which he quotes and that is how I’ll end my seminar.

“If often he was wrong, and, at times, absurd,

To us he is no more a person

Now but a whole climate of opinion.”

First Week. First HCJ. We're back baby!

Woooooooo!!! Spring Break!!! I mean, erm, HCJ!!!! Well we're back at university and of course, it's not all fun and games. The lectures return and this year HCJ is going hard. If we thought we'd seen it all with Romanticism, Empiricism and the rest, we haven't seen anything yet.

If we're going with definitions, I'm going to need some help from my old friend Collin(s online dictionary). Modernism is defined as an early and mid twentieth century movement in art, literature and music that rejected traditional styles and techniques. Well that's all very well and good but what does it mean to us in our HCJ course and in a wider context of journalism?

The lecture had a fairly loose structure to it, taking in many of the topics we will cover in more detail later on in the course. Firstly we looked to William Randolph Hearst, one of the most influential men in the history of Journalism. To give him a brief (and I mean very brief) history, he was an extremely successful businessman, owning a newspaper chain with nearly 30 titles in major American cities at its peak, expanding later to magazines. His life story was the inspiration for the Orson Welles film, Citizen Kane which we watched after the lecture and which I will talk slightly more about after the main thrust, (possibly a poor choice of word) of my blog.

The 19th century was the paradigm of change. The paradigm of modern movement where everything relates, no idea is right and there is no real self. A lot of angst and Schopenhauer concluding that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled, (more on him later in the course, nothing like a bit of suspense). We also looked at Wagner, and heard Wagner a whole lot of a Wagner. With good reason though as we discovered his place as the overarching figure of high modernity. Head of the course Chris Horrie called Wagner's The Ring Cycle the central artefact of western culture.

The final most important character we looked at in brief was Friedrich Nietzsche whose most famous work is arguably God is Dead. I'll admit that at the moment I don't really know much about Nietzsche but I hope through the reading we have been set and the lectures I'll get to know more. I think I'll definitely need to read the Nietzsche chapters from Anthony Kenny's book and also go back to our reading from last year and Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.

Lastly, I really rather enjoyed Citizen Kane. It has clearly aged but as an 'almost' documentary of William Randolph Hearst it's a invaluable source of information for us in his study. Also, Orson Welles is amazing.

This blog was slightly disjointed, as is the nature of a first lecture back. Hopefully they'll improve again and the Alexa rankings will soar or something.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Emile Zola - J'Accuse!!!

We were thrown metaphorically back into lectures this week and our subject was Emile Zola and more specifically the Dreyfus affair which lead to Zola's famous piece, J'Accuse. The piece itself is one of the most important pieces of journalism that we have looked at so far, but to understand it, you have to look at the context of the time and the events surrounding it.

J'Accuse was written after a war between the once mighty French army (in Napoleonic times at least) and the Prussian Army combined with the Germanic states. The French lost. Embarrassing right? Well they certainly thought so. They thought it was so bad, that they needed to blame a random Jewish officer, and sentence him to a lifetime on Devil's Island with no human contact and barely enough food to survive. Let's hope the justice system in France has moved on a little since then. If it has it will be somewhat down to the actions of Emile Zola as he wrote and published the influential J'Accuse; investigative journalism at its best. The point behind J'Accuse was that many people knew that Dreyfus was innocent, and in fact knew that another man Esterhazy was the true culprit and traitor, but those in the highest seats of power chose to do nothing. In J'Accuse, Zola accuses outright those whom he believes through his investigative journalism have the hand of blame upon them for the imprisonment of Dreyfus, fully understanding that by doing so he is breaching the country's libel laws, defaming people left, right and centre. As is standard amongst controversial historical figures, Zola had to run away to London to escape persecution but the upshot of his most famous work is that Dreyfus was eventually pardoned. Yes, pardoned. Even with the force of the truth behind him, exposed by Zola, Dreyfus had to accept a pardon, almost like saying "I did it but you're letting me go because you're nice".

The political climate at the time of the Dreyfus affair was not the best, the war against the Prussian forces still fresh in the memory, France tried to create an Empire themselves to establish a sense of pride in the country. The country was still seen as militaristic so the Army was seen as a symbol of French identity. So whilst France wanted revenge against Germany/Prussia, they knew they couldn't defeat them so this is where Dreyfus comes in. The actual events leading up to Dreyfus being accused are easy enough to understand. Dreyfus was a captain in the French army around the time some secret documents were found in a bin inside the German Embassy. "How did they get there?" I don't hear you ask; well as I said before it turns out Esterhazy was the real culprit passing secrets, but there was a lot of anti-Semitism at the time in France, so Jewish Dreyfus was framed and court-martialed and so on (see above).

I think for the purposes of this blog it may also be interesting to look at the Paris Commune, an organisation set up by the workers whilst the rich landlords were hiding from the Prussian invaders, somewhere in France. The Commune was set up in March 18, 1871 and lasted a very short time until May 28th of that same year. It is often hailed as the first assumption of power by the working class during the industrial revolution; Karl Marx called it "the dictatorship of the proletariat." The movement was not just Marxist or Anarchic, it also had a feminist agenda, setting up nurseries, abolishing night working and establishing the right of workers to take over businesses; It also separated the Church and the State. Eventually though, the rich returned with armies and the Commune was ruthlessly destroyed, 20 to 30,000 are thought to have been executed, concentrating on the working class areas of Paris. It was a short lived movement, but had great impact on the politics of France and the wider world.

Back to J'Accuse. Whilst Zola's article never got Dreyfus acquitted, it did cause some people to think about the government and its corruption, in fact it took an entirely new government to even pardon Dreyfus, such was the level of corruption. Dreyfus was brought back from Devil's Island a broken man and though he went on to fight in World War 1, the final irony came when his granddaughter dies during World War 2 in Auschwitz death camp.

Well that was the last blog of lectures of my first year studying Journalism. Hope you've enjoyed reading my blog, I'm sure I'll keep it updated over the summer.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

19th Century: The Age of Change (with some William Cobbett)

Calling it The Age of Change doesn't half make it sound important but I suppose there's no underestimating the influence of this period on this country's history. It was the transformation of Britain from an agricultural society to an industrial one and it's this transformation that forms much of the focus in William Cobbett's book, Rural Rides.

The 19th century wasn't just about industrial change though. It was also a move from the enlightenment of the 17th/18th century (a clockwork and mechanistic paradigm), to the paradigm of change and organism, so for example Darwin and evolution. Subjects like geology, (melting rocks would have been unimaginable to Newton); Biology, Organic Chemistry where chemical change is very much different to mechanical change. The people of the time were also exposed to Eastern civilization and in particular non-Ibrahimic religions which gave new concepts of the earth and the universe (especially Hinduism). You can observe the impact of Hinduism and Buddhism as an ultimately profound thing on the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche - it was a pathway to modernism. As I said before though it did cause industrial change, it moved science to mass production in the factory system. First it caused the destruction of the peasantry in Great Britain as in the Highland Clearances, this brings you to the the impoverished of Ireland and rural England whom Cobbett wrote so much about (Jonathan Swift also, thinking back to earlier blogs); finally we have the migration to the cities and migration to the colonies which another great writer of the time, Charles Dickens, wrote about in great detail. Dickens wrote about these subjects and as such, laws like the new poor law of 1844 and the rise of the workhouses affected him greatly in his writings and novels i.e. Oliver Twist. He also wrote about subjects like illegitimacy and inheritance of the upper classes in novels like Bleak House.

The conditions of the English working class were pretty abysmal at this point but people of the time, as now, looked at the issues through very different eyes. Thomas Malthus, the British scholar and theorist of political economy looked at it with, unsurprisingly, an economist's eyes and his An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, observed that sooner or later population gets checked by famine and disease. Using our knowledge of Hegel from previous blogs he saw it as teleological historicism; what's that you say? Well essentially it means the idea that history unfolds inexorably (I'm really going for these big words today) according to universal laws. Anyway, this led on to him seeing the battle of nations as a force in history and in this case, possibly what was happening to the British working class is much closer to the battle of the classes that Marx enjoys banging on about so much. You can in turn contrast the static mechanism of the empiricists with the dynamism of Hegel creating a pathway to relativity. Using the metaphor of evolution in liberal society policy, you see population growth, Victorian social reform, liberal democracy and imperialism, socialism and social reform, and origins of the modern industrial estate (especially in Germany where Max Weber and his sociology is so influential).

Charles Darwin (no introduction needed I think) followed the tradition of empiricism and scientific method as evident in his theory of evolution as he collected species and observed what would become one of the biggest discoveries of the age. He saw the effect of evolution by natural selection and the descent of man from common ancestors, survival of the fittest and all that, but that's also a key concept of cumulative causation e.g. in economics which you can contrast to Adam Smith and his hidden hand of the market.

There were also impacts in this century on religion, the biblical criticism movement in particular in Germany from the 1830s onwards (Fuerbach et al)

Wow this blog has been pretty disjointed, I put that partly down to the fact it was written in short and confusing bursts over four weeks but excuses are just that. Hope you enjoy deciphering what points I was trying to get across and that you've had a very Happy Easter.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Lecture 9 - Karl Marx (with some Hegel thrown in for kicks)

Karl Marx had a bushy beard, there I said it, it's out the way and I don't have to think about it again. In related news, he was also a philosopher but not in the way we normally think of philosophers. He once said that "philosophers have only interpreted the world - the point however is to change it" and it is this that lies at the heart of his works.

Marx was born to a Jewish family which, depending on your opinion, has either no significance or great significance but let's go with great significance because it's a much more fun idea. Some people have commented saying that Marx saw himself as some sort of Old Testament prophet and even the wild beard and hair were significant; it seems he saw himself as someone coming to tell the 'good news' of the communist message as if it was something Biblical, which in some ways it was. Biblical in the sense of its size and impact but more on that later. The young Marx studied Law initially and was an exceptionally gifted student with a lucrative career ahead of him. Suddenly he decided he was more interested in philosophy which angered his parents but what angered them more was his next decision to become a Journalist. Lawyer to philosopher to journalist and it was his skills as a journalist that made his most well known work The Communist Manifesto so readable and persuasive.

He was one of the Young Hegellians, influenced greatly by Hegel's ideas on dialectics and this was to form a large part of his manifesto. He made a move into radical journalism and revolution meeting Friedrich Engels in Paris in 1844, the start of a friendship which encompassed co-authored works and the publishing of Marx's other writings posthumously. Marx's journalism at this time was rather inflammatory and it got him kicked out of countries for the radical beliefs he promoted. He was giving philosophical backing to the revolutions bubbling under the surface in Europe at the time. In 1848 he was pushed out to London where he lived until his death in 1883. His tombstone has one of his most famous quotes, the one at the heart of his communist manifesto, "workers of all lands unite." In the lecture we were reminded of a campaign slogan by Bill Clinton which said "It's the economy stupid" and Marx approached his theories in a similar way. He believed that you can explain everything about society by analysing the economic forces that shape it. For Aristotle, man is the political animal; for Plato, man is the political animal; for Kant, the moral animal; for Hegel, the historical animal; for Marx, man is the productive animal. Mankind creates the environment it inhabits - 'not a figure in the landscape, but the shaper of the landscape'. We dominate because we can make tools and co-operate.

In his works, Marx achieved (according to Engels) a combination of Hegellian philosophy in his history and dialectics, British empiricism with economists like Smith and French revolutionary politics especially socialist. He worked using a Darwinian scientific method, researching every aspect of society in order to understand it; he worked his through the reading in the British Museum. Hegel had a large influence on Marx and his historical process in terms of the spirit through history and its seeking of self understanding. History will end when the spirit achieves full self knowledge and becomes the absolute spirit. This process works through the dialectic:

• Thesis (Proposition)
• Antithesis (Counter proposition - contradiction)
• Synthesis (Combination or refuting of one proposition)

Hegel called the spirit Geist and believed history is being guided by the Geist towards an eventual end. Marx took the idea of the dialectic as he liked that two ideas could form one new idea but as far as Geist went, he thought that was all mystic rubbish.

Marx saw the class struggle throughout history, the master and slave, the lord and serf and now the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. His dialectic is based on Hegel's but reflects a more economised view, basing it on money in the real world, a so called "dialectic materialism". In this he argues that the proletariat have nothing to lose, "they have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." Other groups like the bourgeoisie have property to lose so cannot possibly be as selfless.

One of Marx’s most important theories in The Communist Manifesto is that of alienation. It comes from his theory of human nature in which - like Plato - Marx proposes that we have a tripartite self. We as human beings have three aspects or needs; the natural self which needs subsistence; the alienated self where natural needs are perverted, sex perverted by male dominated society, productivity and activity not met; finally the species self which understands we are all part of one another and will emerge in the Communist State. Capitalism, Marx states, alienates us from ourselves and each other, as we value things over each other, the cash nexus becomes the criterium of all value. As a generalised statement this works in theory but I think many people would value friends and family more than money and things, the laptop I'm writing this blog on isn't as important to me as my parents for example. Marx was writing in a time of child labour and possibly this cruelty in the name of financial gain tarnished his world view; as he once said, "Bourgeoisie has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment." Marx claims that the communist society will be characterized by equality and true justice and the evolution of a truly free individual. In a truly Hegellian manner, he looks at communism in this way:

• Thesis: The Bourgeoisie
• Antithesis: The Proletariat
• Synthesis: Socialism

Capitalism is sowing the seeds of its own destruction... apparently. Marx even provided a nice little sound bite for this idea, "capitalism produces all things in profusion but most of all it produces its own grave diggers." Capitalism encourages intense competition and so its eventual fall is inevitable as is the rise of the proletariat.

Communism will be some sort of Garden of Eden where no countries exist, no possessions and no religion. There will be no difference between mental and physical labour, no division. All activities will have equal worth. But how? What incentive would a Doctor have to do 7 years of training if in the end his salary will be the same as that of a bin man, whose job is hugely important and extremely necessary, but cannot possibly be seen as equal; good luck with that Marx. To explain this in an easy to digest way, Marx said "To each - according to ability. To each - according to need."

Procrastinators of the world unite!!! Tomorrow...

Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.


P.S. Sorry for the late and slightly disjointed blog, was attempting to write it whilst also doing a bunch of other assessments.

Spot the brief French Revolution reference

Comment on this blog with the line of the song which references the French Revolution which has been the focus of a few of my blogs lately, and also, stick an idea in for a blog, current affairs story, thoughts on journalism or philosophy, anything. I need ideas.

Link here---> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xfdGXA62ZM

Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.

Lecture 8 - Romanticism (but mostly this dude Prometheus)

A lecture doesn't often start with music from a Beethoven opera but it makes a nice change. The music in question was the Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, composed in 1801, right in the heart of the Romantic movement. This week's lecture was delivered by a guest, Dr Gary Farnell of the British Association for Romantic Studies who also doubles up as the head of English Literature at the University of Winchester. He began by telling us all about the legend of Prometheus, how he stole fire from the Gods to give it to mankind, how he was punished by Jupiter, chained to a rock and a vulture tearing out his liver for 30 years. Prometheus then is a symbol of the Romantic movement, all about the renewal of humanity and the creation of mankind; the themes at the heart of the Prometheus legend.

Prometheus is an extremely old story, dating back to Greek Mythology, who came back to the fore during the Romantic movement and was adopted as a God of Romanticism. Several figures in the movement used the legend as the basis of their works; for example Lord Byron's Prometheus (inventive name), Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and his other half, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, often known as The Modern Prometheus. The character of Prometheus is the champion of oppressed human kind according to Romanticism, a God who embodies the spirit of 'liberty, equality and fraternity', a quote from the French Revolution of 1789. On a slightly related topic, Percy Shelley is quoted as having said to Byron in 1816 that "the French Revolution is the master theme of the epoch in which we live." This doesn't seem so ridiculous if you've read my previous blog but it is quite interesting to note that Percy Shelley was not even born until 1792. The revolution passed him by without direct effect on his life and even he knows how important it is.
*Note to self: Do more study on the Revolution, I'm sensing a theme emerging*

Continuing with our new found friend Percy Shelley I'm going to briefly look at one of his poems, written in 1818, which links directly to Prometheus in its themes, maybe his most famous poem, Ozymandias. The poem is infused with a revolutionary spirit within the form of a sonnet (the form will become more relevant later) and focuses on the 13th Century BC Egyptian Pharaoh Ozymandias, better known as Rameses II. It was composed after a visit to the British Museum where there stands a huge bust of Rameses II and is written as a critique of Empires like that of Ozymandias which were 'built on sand' quite literally and, if you were trying to be clever which I do every now and then, also could link to the imperial power at the time of the British Empire. Bit of a curveball there but there is a suggestion in the poem of a link between the Museum and Empire, the whole notion of taking artefacts from their natural home to exhibit them for their own purposes is rejected by Shelley, linking back to the 'empires on the sand' idea, it suggests that however powerful an Empire is, their time will always come to an end. Shelley uses the form of a sonnet ironically as sonnets usually elevate their subject, such as in the form of all the Shakespearean love sonnets, and reverses it, critiquing the whole idea of Empires and calling for a new beginning; very revolutionary. As a side note, you can see the poem resonating in connection to the Egyptian revolution of the last month in which a tyrannical 'King of Kings' type character was overthrown; the spirit of Prometheanism is alive in Egypt.

We now move from Shelley's Political Prometheanism to Aesthetic Prometheanism, the notion of making or creating things, like humankind, which further inspires Romantic writers. Writers like John Keats for example and, in particular, his 1819 poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn which rather inconveniently for him has now turned out to be a Roman 2nd Century AD urn, known as the Townley Vase, but never mind. Once again, it is a poem inspired by a visit to the British Museum but instead of looking at the notion of empires, it examines the art of the vase. Its form acknowledges an element of self conscious artifice in the artistic set of creation, and is an opportunity for Keats to demonstrate his poetic skills in celebrating the artistry of the urn. In the poem it is worth noting the finely turned phrases, use of personification, artificially alternating line length, all evident within the first lines

"Thou still unravished bride of quietness and slow time
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme –"

These are all signifiers of Keats' creativity and this creativity in turn is an example of the sanctification of the human ability to make or create. The final lines of the poem, '"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know' illustrate the poem better than I ever could.

As a final point, the superiority of art in Romantic Aestheticism is in obvious relation with Hegel and Kant of the German idealist school of philosophy but for more on that, you'll just have to wait for my seminar paper which will be posted sometime in the next week. Returning to Prometheus, he signifies the bringing together of the two elements of Romanticism, the political and the aesthetic. I'll leave you with a quote from Lord Byron's Prometheus, "Thou art a symbol and a sign / To mortals of their fate and force."

Until next time. Stay Classy Internet

Lecture 7 - Rousseau, Romanticism and the rights of Women.

It was our first lecture of the new semester this week and our main focus was Rousseau and the Romantic movement which he inspired. We were told what to expect from this latest module of HCJ with the focus moving from the Enlightenment and Empiricists of last semester, i.e Locke and Hume, to Romanticism, Rousseau and Revolution.

The Romantic movement was a gradual change to more subjectivity, emotion and intuition in philosophy in almost direct contrast to the Enlightenment's resistance to the idea of only divine intervention, held throughout the middle ages. The vacuum formed by this idea was filled by the belief in a divinity of nature which Rousseau endorsed. The Romantic movement is often remembered for its art and literature, Gabriel Rossetti, William Wordsworth and William Blake were all exponents of the Romantic school. The enlightenment gave us such rational thinkers as Locke and Hume and taught us to aspire to know everything; it taught us that with experience and testing you could. This really should be the end of History and Context but I'm still typing, and that means we've got a whole lot more to cover

Rousseau was an early exponent of Romantic philosophy and could be seen as the original romantic, at least in terms of the movement. In the pre-Enlightenment period the creative force was Christianity. Paintings, poems and books all based on the teachings and stories of the Christian church. After the waves caused by the Enlightenment, the divinity of nature became the driving creative force. It was a political time bomb and created a kind of cult of sensibility which all came from one personal experience for Rousseau. He had an intense experience whilst listening to the waves where all worries and painful memories about the past and anxieties for the future melted away, leaving only the sense of being. He decided that nothing true had come before, citing nature as the only real truth. This belief in the beauty and innocence of nature extended to man as natural man was virtuous, i.e. the idea of 'the noble savage'. He saw the people of Tahiti, still living primitively as a kind of paradise, untouched by the corruption of the 18th Century. This is in complete contrast to Hobbes whom we studied last semester who acknowledged the state of nature, but thought it horrible rather than beautiful. Rousseau's philosophy was similar in part to Locke who believed that people were generally pretty good but that a limited government is needed for problems with things like property.

Rousseau's main philosophical idea was his belief in the supremacy of emotion. He said that "man is born free, but everywhere is in chains." His philosophy asks us to make a move back to nature by "taking men as they are, and laws as they might be" so we can get out of the trap of self esteem. Rousseau's problem: "Find a form of association which defends and protects with all the common force, the person and goods of each associate and by means of which each one while uniting with all obeys only himself and remains as free as before." Rousseau developed the idea of The General Will which states that there are certain laws that we can agree on but as long as we all agree on them, there is no loss of freedom; we are just obeying ourselves. This contrasts with a liberal philosophy as public and private are the same and does contain the danger of becoming a new type of dictatorship. By this I mean that Rousseau explicitly states that anyone refusing to follow the general will, will be "forced to be free" in a way. Freedom exists in Rousseau's world only in service.

These ideas lead to one of the most important events in world history, the French Revolution. When the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, Zhou Enlai (1949-76) was asked about the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, he replied, "It is too soon to say." I'll go into more detail of the revolution in a later blog perhaps, but for this blog and its focus of Rousseau it is important to note the Declaration of the rights of man which says we should be born free, remain free and be equal in rights with the law being the expression of general will. All this, the Tennis Court oath and the National Assembly was attractive to rebels in England who followed Rousseau's philosophy carefully, the poet William Wordsworth was quoted as saying, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." Behind all that malarkey though, Wordsworth was expressing the feelings of many young revolutionaries who were seeing the Romantic movement and Rousseau's idea of natural man in reality. In the revolution, a new world was seemingly created, with nothing having come before it. The King and other royals were executed through the new 'egalitarian' method of the guillotine, one of the enduring images of the revolution and paranoia spread, leaving them in almost a worse place than before. Revolutions rarely go smoothly and often do not end as planned.

I'm going to finish this blog by talking briefly about Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist writer whose ideas were in places very much a reaction to Rousseau's; a kind of love/hate relationship between their ideals. Education at the time was at the time quite superficial for women and they were taught mainly to focus on their appearance but Wollstonecraft looked at education from a similar perspective as Locke's Tabula Rasa, reasoning that if you educate people properly, you can make them into rational and responsible citizens. Rousseau's influence on her work was that she also called for a more egalitarian society, where a hatred of sophistication was the norm. She wasn't asking for a return to nature but asked purely that Men and Women be treated just as human beings; asexual or non-sexual until they are in love, when they assume a gendered identity. This last point is the one most often criticised as it contrasts her otherwise staunchly feminist views.

Thanks for reading my first blog of this new semester, please visit as often as you like, there will always be something interesting to read. Tell your friends.

Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.

The Philosophers Song

As it's the end of the semester I thought I'd treat any readers of this blog to something different. In fact, you could say 'and now for something completely different' as it's Monty Python's Philosophers Song.

Link here--> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNDTUUmz_9s

It just made sense after a long hard semester in which we learnt a hell of a lot about philosophers to learn just the one more detail about them.

Seminar Paper Points - Swift and Smith

Our seminar this week focused on Adam Smith and Jonathan Swift.

We began with Louis' seminar paper which started with Smith saying that the opulence of a town can change a nation. This is quite a modern idea and Smith's ideas do translate into the modern world quite easily as he claims that the wealth of every nation is dependent on trade. Smith gives the examples of boom towns such as Manchester as a place that has thrived through trade in the way that Smith felt was best. He looked at the Romans as the originators of the modern world where the land you own affects what you manufacture. Smith was in favour of the free market and were he alive today, he would possibly point to Zimbabwe as an example of where the lack of free trade has caused the country to crumble. This is an example of Smith's links to his contemporary Hume as it recalls Hume's rights to life, liberty and property. You could also argue its link to the current banking crisis and the free trade that went on there to lead us to the situation we are in now.

Louis then moved on to Jonathan Swift and more specifically his Modest Proposal or to give it its full name, 'A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public'. The 'Modest Proposal', as it is more commonly known, outlines the use of the Irish children and specifically toddlers for food. It advocates the fattening up of one year old babies for food to sell to the rich as it would solve the debt problem in Ireland. Swift even specifies that 100,000 carcasses would be enough to benefit the state, because it benefits the state, I also believe the points he makes to be mercantile. Fortunately, this is a satirical work which satirises the un-emotional empiricist tracts of Locke and Hume. Even the title is a piece of satire, unusually long in its attempt to satirise the "Enquiry" and "Essay" like works of the day.

This seminar was one that I struggled the most with, especially the works of Adam Smith as I have no background in economics or business to use. I enjoyed Swift however as I appreciated the satire especially after having to sit here blogging away for months about these empiricists. Time for me to go do some revision, exam not far off now.

Until next time. Stay classy Internet.

Lecture 5 - Adam Smith amongst some history

The economist Adam Smith was our topic for the lecture this week and I found him, despite previous reservations about the theories of an economist in comparison to the philosophers we had previously studied, to be an extremely interesting subject.


Economics is often seen as the dismal science as it has all the empiricism of science and none of the excitement. Adam Smith was archetypally an empiricist though and had an objective way of looking at things, there was no metaphysics in Smith's theories, he simply looked at human behaviour with an economic mindset. His price mechanism theory suggests that what people are prepared to pay for gives us an idea of human behaviour; we can exactly measure what people 'want'. Smith is often seen as the founder of modern economics and his Wealth of Nations is relevant even to economists today. He was Scottish which is significant as Scotland was going through an enlightenment and even a renaissance period which included the last lectures subject Hume, of whom Smith was a contemporary; in fact, Smith published Hume's posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. He was also a contemporary of James Watt.

Prior to Adam Smith there was mercantilism which was essentially a religious way of looking at economy. Pose the question, "Why is the UK richer than Africa?" to a mercantile and they would respond saying it was 'God's Will'; it links to the whole spirit of enterprise theory that suggests some people are just automatically better at enterprise than others. Empiricists like Smith however look solely at 'the facts'. Mercantilists were medieval thinkers and feudalistic types who believed in in enriching the state but Smith is liberal in a Hume style; economics is about enriching yourself. Smith asserts that he is objectively measuring human behaviour through economic science.

The Mercantile state began to decline with Elizabeth I when we began to move out in to the 'new world' of America and the exploitation of the countries we moved in to. The British were pirates really for a long time, building faster ships that could steal gold from the Spanish Galleons and with the main trade of sugar, tobacco, cotton and slavery from America, we began to compete with the Spanish in the market over in the 'new world'. Once the King lost the Civil War the mercantile state collapsed as the mercantile state would promote a state controlled economy which was no longer possible. The Civil War helped to abolish serfdom which in turn introduced free trade; this meant the stability in society was lost as people had to sell their trade to get by. At this point in history, Scotland had its own form of slavery with the Darien Scheme and on a similar theme, Jonathan Swift wrote his famous, A Modest Proposal. This all relates to the formation of England and the Battle of Culloden, the last major battle in Great Britain which was the end of tribal society. Waterloo makes us the number one country for a while but the Baptist war made slavery less profitable as the slaves rebelled. This points to the conclusion that it was not a moral act that caused us to abolish slavery, but a profitable one. A parliamentary reform bill granting more power to house of commons is then made and 1846, the repeal of corn laws is the end of the Mercantile system for good this time, (no really). Cheap bread essentially caused the ruin of British Agriculture.

Adam Smith though approves of all of this, to him it is just a new world, change of a global scale. He has thoughts on morality like his contemporaries and believes there is no such thing as good and evil, only desire. People only function for less pain and more pleasure. This is part of his theory on utilitarianism where you actively calculate the consequences of your actions; if you be honest to everyone all the time, you will be thought of as honest and might be given a job. In his Wealth of Nations he asks What is Wealth?, is it a sense of pride and accomplishments and so on? Well no. It all resolves to cash according to Smith. The only thing that money cannot bring is poverty. He also talks about the 'Hidden Hand of the Market' which actually comes across as a metaphysical concept, something Smith was mostly against. He says that the market is metaphysically sorting people into what they are good at like some sort of deranged sorting hat from Harry Potter. He uses the example of a pin factory where everyone does their own set job in order to create the final product of the pin; a kind of 'division of labour' theory where your skill means you specialise in a certain type of labour. Left to our own devices, we as people will use any relevant advantages to hand to make a living. To Smith, unemployment is impossible unless the government is actively trying to stop you from working. Trade and work promotes peace, civility, moderation, toleration, innovation, science and concern for others; therefore, it is ultimately a good thing. Well done Smith, shame you didn't just say that.

Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.


P.S. This blog rambled a bit but I put that mainly down to not entirely understanding Smith having never done economics ever. This is lamest of excuses however and to address the situation I'm hoping to do some reading into the subject.

Seminar notes - David Hume

The seminar today was given by Josh who had David Hume as his subject and more specifically, the Enquiry into Human Understanding. I found it interesting to discuss Hume as I was not entirely confident on the subject of his theories and ideas so here are the notes I made on the seminar.

It interested me that Hume defined two types of philosophy; one that appeals to the sense and one that endeavours to form an understanding to which Hume belongs. On the subject of understanding he believes that you get impressions which imprint on you and so you recollect them to form ideas. The mind can therefore go beyond reality, the image of a winged horse can be imagine because we have seen a horse and we have seen a bird so the mind makes the link. In the same way he reasons that we experience good and intelligence so we believe in a God but there is no way to actually prove it. In the same way we can imagine shades of colour that we have never seen because we have seen other colours; Hume himself acknowledges that this actually goes against his theories as it promotes innate ideas. In the seminar we talked at length about the existence of a greenish purple and whether because you know of green and you know of purple, you can imagine the colour in the middle.

We understand things in sequences so for example we understand injury in the order of things that happen; drop a hammer on your foot, it hurts, sequence. Hume also talks about sceptical doubt which is linked to relation of ideas; if a machine is in a desert for example, our mind tells us that someone must have been here before us to put the machine there but this is not necessarily true. There is absolutely no way we can prove this to be true as it is just a thought process, it is not based on facts. In this way he is not particularly a fan of Descartes obsession with breaking down knowledge as it suggests that all the ideas you have are innate, something Hume would not agree with. He also does not agree with the idea of matter of fact with the example of stone and metal, if you drop a stone we expect it to drop but we cannot assume it will do that next time. We have a concept of upward movement so the next time the stone could shoot upwards. Just because we have seen something happen once does not guarantee it will happen again. In the same way, Hume argues that when in billiards, the white hits the red ball, you cannot assume that this action caused the red ball to move. You cannot assume that A causes B in anything; this is central to his ideas on causality.

His induction theory relies on two types of thought, analytic such as all spiders are arachnids, and synthetic thought where you need to accept the axiom (to use the example from Josh, "men are pigs, I am a pig"). These are irrational thought processes that lead people to unfounded assumptions. This helps form part of his work on miracles and these are not the kind of miracles we might think of, (Chilean miners surviving being trapped underground for 70 days) but actually miracles as in those from scripture. He reasons that you do not know them from experience so why do you accept them as truth; he asks that you weigh up miracles, if someone has been raised from the dead, can you really believe this? If you can't which Hume would say you can't then you can also no longer be a Christian as Hume says you need a miracle to be a Christian. Because of the time in which Hume was writing he could not be totally explicit with these views and so he comments that people who experience miracles must be different as a miracle is unexplainable. In the seminar we talked for a short while about miracles saying that things can only seem miracles without prior scientific knowledge. Penicillin must have seemed like a miracle at first but now it is accepted as standard because we have the scientific proof of how it works and the scientific testing to show what happens. Miracles are defined as something that breaks natural laws so whilst the light bulb would at one point have been seen as something unnatural then now it is accepted as a natural law in itself.

Some final notes on the seminar from our discussion throw light on the issue with colour as colours are not synthetic as may have been suggested earlier. They are vivid impressions so it is practically impossible to imagine the greenish purple colour from before as colours are just fact. Hume also believed that the names we give to objects was secondary to the nature of the thing. He was not a political writer like Locke but believes in provisional truths. With the issue involving the stone and metal, this is not applicable in space for example as things only go up and down in space in relation to you. We also discussed that there was no morality in circumstance; normally stealing is seen as morally wrong but Hume questions why. If you are stealing to save your starving family and feed them then no one would find this reprehensible; this means that stealing must not be a moral thing. As a final point, if Hume were around today he would be anti extremist as he took the view that no one knew all the answers, not even him.

Until next time. You stay classy Internet.

Lecture 4 - David Hume tbh

In our latest lecture the main focus was the hugely influential and important David Hume. He is influential to many philosophers but also us journalists as his approach asks us to constantly verify information. He comes from the empirical school of philosophy and believes that ideas are synthesised; this is in great distinction from the idealists and rationalists such as Descartes. His approach is more like science whereas the rationalist viewpoint comes from a more religious way of thinking. He was probably an Atheist as to be religious would go against his own theories but to have said so in his time he would probably have been prosecuted and killed if he said so; Galileo was persecuted just because he questioned some of the less fundamental aspects of religion. Hume's work helped influence the modern philosophy of Logical Positivism (The Vienna Circle) which is the philosophy that modern science uses and social science follows as well. Social science is the scientific explanation of human behaviour, similar to but not entirely like Sociology.
Hume saw things in a similar way to Einstein and Einstein 'admitted that he could not have the gumption to oppose Newton's immortal status without reading Hume'. He saw things as mechanisms with no absolute truths or knowledge. Just because the sun rose yesterday doesn't mean it will tomorrow; the sun rising is a mental illusion, (admittedly the sun does not rise, it just appears to). He had ideas on a number of things, for example he had ideas on causation saying that it is only happening in your head, not in nature. With an example of billiard balls he says that whilst the white ball hits the red, you cannot know that it was this that caused the red ball to move, you cannot show the causation. On the subject of induction and logic he says you can draw inferences from your own synthetic logic, e.g. you can add knowledge to certain things as the brain synthesizes them together; an example of this would be a unicorn (bear with me), if you know what a horse looks like and you know what a rhinoceros looks like your brain can synthesize the image of a unicorn. Hume also had thoughts on morality, the 'is/ought' dichotomy, but there is no morality in phenomena - no teleology - if Hume were alive today and was told to solve the speeding problem, he would simply put up more cameras.

Hume's philosophy influences the modern philosophy of Logical Positivism which follows the verification principle. By this I mean that any knowledge you might have needs to be verified to have scientific value. The metaphysical needs to be separated from science, this is part of Aristotle's logic, it needs to be non-contradictory, i.e. if the sun is not the moon, then the moon is not the sun. In logical positivism there are three kinds of statements: those statements that can be verified as provisionally 'true', non contradictory; those statements that can be verified as definitely false, contradictory; and those statements that cannot be verified, gibberish. This is very similar in the way it functions to how a computer operates and thinks.

If Hume was the progenitor of logical positivism, Karl Popper was a disciple of Hume's theories and philosophy and took the theories to their logical conclusion. He ritually attacks metaphysics, what he wants is science but he also attacks the verification principle as this is also metaphysics. The statement that non-verifiable statements are gibberish is gibberish itself as it is not actually verifiable. To Karl Popper, statements need to be falsified also, it must be capable of not just verification but falsification.

Hume sought to take to its logical conclusion the work of earlier empiricists such as Locke and Berkeley, rooting out any explanations that depended on invention rather than experience. In the book I Think Therefore I Am: All the Philosophy You Need to Know by Lesley Levene, she writes that "Reasoning, says Hume, is about discovering relationships between things. He identified two different sorts: 'relations of ideas' and 'matters of fact'. That 15 is half of 30, for example, can be discovered and demonstrated by reason alone, without reference to other forms of evidence, so belongs in the first category. Statements such as 'The sun will rise tomorrow', however, cannot be demonstrated by reason alone; as long as their negation is conceivable, we depend on experience to determine whether they are true or false - which means they belong in the second category." She goes on to say that, for Hume, "mathematics was the only worthwhile form of demonstrative reasoning. Books that did not contain mathematical demonstrations or empirical reasoning - he singled out those on metaphysics and theology in particular - deserved to be 'committed to the flames' as nothing but sophistry and illusion".

To journalists, Hume is so important that this blog really does not do him justice so it will be interesting to look into him more and the seminar will also be an interesting experience.

Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.

Seminar Notes - Early Journalism

In our latest seminar we had a paper from Ali on the subject of Joseph Addison, one of the early journalists of the late 17th and early 18th century. We talked about how Addison was in fact quite a modern man as the ideas he portrayed in 'The Royal Exchange' talked about how multicultural the place was and how this seemed a good thing. An alternative reading however came to light that changed almost all our opinions on the reading as it showed Addison as a more cynical and possibly even bitter writer who, though witty, was actually displeased with the way his world was. Little things that we had not picked up on, like certain phrases that suggested his point of view. He talks about how Volumes "get away with being dull" which essays do not, suggesting a contempt for the volume format and possibly an air that his form is more worthwhile as it is more focused. He speaks in a humorous way but makes many poignant statements that Ali picked up on such as, 'there is a kind of heaviness that hangs on mans head'.

Often in Addison's writings, the statements which appear to be compliments actually disguise the biggest insults; this was the style at the time which is best observed in the video that used to be on the Winchester Journalism homepage featuring the opening scene of The Draughtsman's Contract which contained the sort of language that Addison would have been familiar with. In his essays he talks about the sort of 'voluntary moles' who do not want to hear the news or have their opinions challenged, similar to the wilful ignorance of some people today. He perfectly describes the tabloids and their methods which can also still apply today.

"Should a writer single out particular persons, or point his rallery at any order of men, who by their profession ought to be exempt from it; should he slander the innocent, or satirize the miserable; or should he, even on the proper subjects of derision, give the full play to his mirth, without regard to decency and good-manners; he might be sure of pleasing a great part of his readers, but must be a very ill man, if by such a proceeding he could please himself".

This can also draw parallels to our media law as it seems to be talking about malice, apparently always the red kryptonite of journalists.

It is also interesting to note that Addison's philosophy was most similar to Locke and they both shared Tory sensibilities in the original sense of the Tories and the Whigs.


EDIT: The video of The Draughtsman's Contract no longer appears to be on the Winchester Journalism homepage so here is the video in all its glory.

Lecture 3 - Pretty much History

Our third lecture in the History and Context of Journalism was pretty much a history lesson but it did help to contextualise all the information we had been receiving over the past few weeks by placing it in time.

Journalism is turning information into money. Classy way to open a lecture but it's true. it began in Holland and England in the 1600s and has evolved into the money making leviathan that you can observe today. But how did we get to the point where journalism was even possible? As early as 6000 BC the first recorded system for writing came into being (Chinese pictographic script) begging the question, what were people doing in the millions of years before this. We then moved in the next thousands of years through the Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Sumerian Cuneform script, both ideas slightly too complicated to become standard. A big jump takes us to Latin from which much of our language is taken today. Looking at the picture below of the Lindisfarne Gospel you can see that some of the characters have survived to modern times.

In the 1440s Guttenberg's printing press was invented. Singularly the 'most important invention in history', says Einstein and he should know. He went on to say that: 'it gives man a kind of immortality'. Whereas before, ideas could be written down and lost just as quickly, the printing press gave you immortality because your ideas could live forever in books. This led us on to the Renaissance (for more depth on the subject of the Renaissance, check out my older blogs) where the ideas that had come from the Greeks could finally be written down, recorded and saved before another Dark Ages.

As far as journalism goes, not much happened for a few hundred years until the pamphleteers of the Civil War. Before that though there was one publication that got particular mention in the lecture for its significance to news. Foxes Book of Martyrs turned the pulpit into news media as it documents the persecution of all the important martyrs in history. This was one of the first uses of the printing press that wasn't The Bible; OK so it involved the Bible but it opened the door for the printing press to be used for other more diverse practices. The restoration of the Stuart monarchy brought us not only Charles II but John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, one of the most important pieces we have studied so far, (once again check my previous blogs for notes on John Locke). Eventually, this leads to one of the most important events in the history of journalism; the publication of the first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant (picture below). This was the time of the Whigs in Parliament and Daniel Defoe, sometimes thought of as the father of English journalism, was pamphleteering at this time and was often pilloried for it showing the dangers of journalism in these times.

Comment papers such as The Spectator then began to crop up in the Whig Ascendancy, the content was commercial but witty. This was the time of Joseph Addison and the like whose observations are still wholly readable today. The next real innovation in journalism came with Hogarth and his photo journalism. The minute observations that could be seen within his paintings were able to reflect very accurately whole stories that could not be revealed by the actual articles. His most famous work Gin Alley is often referred back to as one of the best examples of photo journalism, even though it is not really a photo.

From this moment on, the aspects of journalism developed until we get to Fleet Street and then modern journalism. It is these early journalists, (Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, not forgetting photo journalist Hogarth), that helped pioneer journalism and make it the profession it is today.

Apologies for taking so long on this blog but it made it eventually.

Stay Classy Internet.