The stones of Ruskin

For forty years I’ve had an ambition to visit Brantwood, John Ruskin’s house on the shores of Coniston Water, and a couple of weeks ago I achieved it!

Brantwood is big but not grand, and exceedingly interesting because of what it reveals about its owner. I’ve been interested in Ruskin ever since I made my first visit to Venice and read his Stones of Venice, but I hadn’t appreciated what a polymath he was, how wide his interests were and what a powerful influence he was on Victorian life and thought.

The house is set in a 250-acre estate which is threaded with paths designed by Ruskin to make different kinds of botanical and topographic points. We walked the path that circles the estate and leads up to the crag at the top with its sensational views of the lake below and the ‘Old Man’ peak that looms above it. All in all, a wonderful day out. Highly recommended.

The odd thing about the ‘Lake District’

As regular readers know, I recently had an enjoyable holiday in the Lake District, where we rented a house on the nice (i.e. quiet) side of Windermere. But I made the mistake on the blog of referring to “Lake Windermere” — which prompted a nice rebuke from James Cridland (‘mere’ means ‘lake’ so ‘Lake Windermere’ is a tautology), and a dish of humble pie for me.

But it also prompted other nice messages. Quentin, for instance, wrote that,

Enjoyed your comment about Lakes this morning; I remember now (but had forgotten) learning as a child that there is only one lake in the Lake District: Bassenthwaite. All of the others are meres, waters, tarns…

And it prompted a nice story from Keith Devlin:

“When we were first living in Lancaster in the late 1970s, we had 3-story, Edwardian, terraced house, and took an overseas visitor to the top floor to see the view. “You can see The Lakes from here,” I said as we entered the room. The visitor paused, and said, “All I can see are mountains.”

Which indeed was the case.

Quote of the Day

”England still stands outside Europe. Europe’s voiceless tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart, and England is not of her flesh and body.”

• John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace

Keynes was writing in 1919. Nothing much changes.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Xavier Boderiou | Uilleann Pipes | The Plains Of Boyle (Hornpipe)

Link

Brief, but lovely.

Long Read of the Day

A concrete vision of the liberal democratic future

If we want a better future, then we need to have an idea of what we would want it to be like. This long, long essay by Noah Smith

It seems that the essay was prompted by watching an interview with, of all people, Peter Thiel — Silicon Valley’s idea of an intellectual.

The other day, I saw a very interesting interview segment with the investor and conservative political activist Peter Thiel. In it, he says that the future has to be a tangible thing in order for people to embrace it, and that — as things stand right now — the only tangible futures that have been put forward are Chinese techno-totalitarianism, Islamism, and West Europe style environmentalism.

Smith doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.

Key pieces of the liberal democratic future vision remain to be filled in, and doing so will be a difficult and fraught process. Not everyone will be happy with the result, either. But it’s something we need to do, or we will leave the future to the people with darker, more dramatic visions that are sure to lead to nowhere good.

I agree, which is why I liked the essay. Hope you do too.

Lest we forget

I came on this tweet by Seb Schmoller yesterday.

The thread is here. It was Seb who first alerted me to Stolpersteine. Since then, whenever I’ve come on them in European cities, I pause to read and try to imagine what they mean. Seb’s thread includes a photograph of those outside the house where his grandparents lived.

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How not to run a country

This week’s Economist cover

Quote of the Day

”Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness that it cannot counterfeit perfectly.”

• Marcel Proust, 1922

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | Over the Rainbow (Tokyo 1984)

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Ark Head

I don’t know about you but I feel increasingly like the guy in the cartoon — except that my concern there’s something terribly wrong with our world, not just the Internet. The difficulty is that remedying any of the wicked problems that beset us lies way above my — or your — pay grade, and perhaps above anyone’s pay grade. And yet nobody writes about this, possibly because nobody wants to admit that we are locked in incompetent systems — ones that can’t fix themselves.

All of which is by way of explaining why I thought this little essay by Venkatash Rao is so interesting. He sees the same enervating dilemma, but has an interesting take on our primary coping mechanism — the (Noah’s) Ark mentality.

We increasingly respond practically to the world without even attempting to make sense of it.

One mental model for this condition is what I call ark head, as in Noah’s Ark. We’ve given up on the prospect of actually solving or managing most of the snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards. Or even meaningfully comprehending the gestalt. We’ve accepted that some large fraction of those problems will go unsolved and unmanaged, and result in a drastic but unevenly distributed reduction in quality of life for most of humanity over the next few decades. We’ve concluded that the rational response is to restrict our concerns to a small subset of local reality–an ark–and compete for a shrinking set of resources with others doing the same. We’re content to find and inhabit just one zone of positivity, large enough for ourselves and some friends. We cross our fingers and hope our little ark is outside the fallout radius of the next unmanaged crisis, whether it is a nuclear attack, aliens landing, a big hurricane, or (here in California), a big wildfire or earthquake.

We’ve concluded the flood cannot be stopped, and we’re building arks to retreat to…

Marvellous, thoughtful piece.

Putin’s latest frightening gambit lies at the bottom of the ocean

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The strange thing about Putin’s assault on Ukraine was that he clearly hadn’t consulted Valery Gerasimov, the guy who in 2013 had radically reconfigured Russian military doctrine at his behest (and is now chief of the Russian armed forces). Gerasimov’s big idea was that warfare in a networked age should combine the traditional kinetic stuff with political, economic, informational, humanitarian and other non-military activities. This would mean, for example, that before firing a shot, you should first use social media and other network tools to misinform, confuse, polarise and demoralise the population of your adversary. In that way, democratic regimes would find it more difficult to motivate their citizens for combat.

Putin’s invasion in February ran directly counter to this doctrine; perhaps Gerasimov was not part of the inner circle of trusted cronies on whom Putin initially relied. Instead the assault was a 1940s-style blitzkrieg, except in Technicolor rather than black and white. And it hasn’t worked. So as he returns to the drawing board, it’s conceivable that the Russian leader has, finally, been talking to Gerasimov. If that’s the case, then their conversations will have rapidly turned to topics such as deniability, asymmetric warfare and identifying the critical weaknesses of their western adversaries.

Which in turn means that they will be thinking less about pipelines and much more about the undersea fibre-optic cables that now constitute the nervous system of our networked world. ..

Read on

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