Bjørn Stærk: All entries

Bookshelf Curiosities: The Jungle is Neutral

Bjørn Stærk — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:03:00 +0100

When you hear the word "adventurer", the person you're visualizing is a British officer named Frederick Spencer Chapman. Greenland explorer, mountain-climber, war hero, (also, less glamorously, ornithologist, filmmaker, photographer and writer), and the man who wrote the book on jungle survival.

Chapman visited Greenland first as part of the Gino Watkins expedition of 1930-31, which went to set up a weather station on the Greenland ice cap. They had so much fun that they came back a year later to cross it. In 1936 Chapman climbed mountains in the Himalayas, then joined a British diplomatic mission to Tibet. All of this he wrote books about, the kind of books that boyhood dreams are made of.

iNorden.org

Bjørn Stærk — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 11:58:03 +0100

There's a new nordic citizen journalism / magazine site, which takes over from depesjer.no: iNorden.org. I'll be posting there - same as here, but there you'll have something else to read in the long, cold months inbetween bearstrong.net posts.

Lesser Known Nobel Peace Prize Winners

Bjørn Stærk — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:56:00 +0100

Quick: Name four Nobel Peace Prize winners from the last 35 years. Easy! (Sanchez, Esquivel, Corrigan and Sato.) Now name some from before 1970. Um .. Gandhi? Close, but not quite. Forgotten Peace Prize winners is a leading cause of being beaten in trivia games, and they can be useful for our historical perspective as well. So come join us on a journey to the days before PowerPoint laureates, back when World Peace was a dream for crazy utopians rather than a media event for the humanitarian jetset. Here are some of the Nobel Peace Prize winners you've forgotten.

An Atheist Reads the Bible

Bjørn Stærk — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 12:53:00 +0200

I've been an atheist for more than a decade. I grew up a Christian, and had read the Bible through a couple of times before realizing that it was all probably not true. Since then I haven't been quite sure what to make of my copies of the Bible. Where does this book belong in my world, and what does it mean to me? In my first years as an atheist I never read the Bible at all, it was too soon for me to approach it as anything other than the manual of a misguided and somewhat immoral theology. But with distance, I've become interested in exploring different ways to read and understand the Bible.

As a Christian I knew only One Way - the Bible is the word of God, a unified and consistent work of Lutheran theology. I came to dislike that way, and I still do. I'll happily tolerate your following it, and nod as you tell me how important this belief system is to you, but it's not for me. You see, I can't help following the Christian tenets to their logical conclusion, and that conclusion is evil and inhuman. Luckily Christians don't do this, they color their theology with their own personal characteristics, good or evil depending on the person, but always human: Some bring compassion, others authoritarianism. Some bring their level heads and common sense, others their fanaticism. I brought my skepticism, and there was just no way for me to reconcile that with Christian theology.

Good Books You Should Feel Under No Obligation to Read

Bjørn Stærk — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 12:19:00 +0200

Do you ever get the feeling, when people talk about books, that there's a list of Major Obligatory Works who everyone who is anything have all read? Everyone, that is, except you? Something about the way a book is mentioned that says "I've read it, and I'll assume you have as well, and if not what are you waiting for"? Book reviews are exhausting to read because we treat them like the admission process of this Obligatory List. "This just in from book central: Book X is now required reading in our circles. I repeat, .." Great, another one? I'm already behind. Help!

Calm down, please. The List, if you believe everyone who is adding to it, is too large for any of us. If you read 50 books a year, that's far more than most, and still not enough. There's no shame in ignoring the List. We've all read different books - and imagine how sad it would be if it were otherwise. If you own just a hundred books, there's probably no other library like yours in the world. The List is just something to do with an eternity, if one were available. The voice of Literary Authority is a pose, laugh it off.

Please take the following book reviews in that spirit. These books are not obligatory, just something I enjoyed, and if you can't read about good books you don't have the time to read without getting sad or going on a guilty Amazon binge, please stop reading now.

James Branch Cabell on Life and Truth

Bjørn Stærk — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 21:10:07 +0200

"'They were so beautiful,' she said, 'so young, so confident in what was to be, and so pitiable! And now some of them are gone away into the far-off parts of the earth, and some of them are gone down under the earth in their black narrow coffins, and the husks of those that remain hereabouts are strange and staid and withered and do not matter any longer. Life is a pageant that passes very quickly, going hastily from one darkness to another darkness with only ignes fatui to guide; and there is no sense in it. I learned that, Kerin, without moiling over books. But life is a fine ardent spectacle; and I have loved the actors in it: and I have loved their youth and high-heartedness, and their ungrounded faiths, and their queer dreams, my Kerin, about their own importance and about the greatness of the destiny that awaited them, - while you were piddling after, of all things, the truth!'"
- James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion (1926)

Off the fence on global warming

Bjørn Stærk — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 15:21:00 +0200

Over the last year there seems to have been a shift in the global warming debate. Even a media non-junkie like me could feel it. The human impact on the climate has become part of the public consciousness in a way it wasn't before, it's more real, more urgent. People aren't ready to buy carbon offsets for their plane trips yet, but they think maybe they ought to. This shift isn't relevant to the issue itself, people seem to believe whatever they want to believe about global warming, adjusting their level of skepticism/naivety according to ideology. If global warming is taken more seriously now than a year ago, this reflects the inscrutable mass interaction of wish and fact, propaganda and education, not necessarily any change in the actual science of climate change.

A year or two ago I decided to become a global warming agnostic, because I realized I wasn't able to separate the facts from what I wanted to believe, which was and still is that the science isn't in so don't worry. Since then I've tried to have no strong opinions myself, but instead listen to what people on both sides have to say, note what makes sense, and what doesn't. It's amazing how easier it is to think clearly when you have no ideological commitments to consider. Like listening to music without ear plugs.

I've decided it's time to come down off the fence now.

John Stuart Mill on communism

Bjørn Stærk — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:17:00 +0200

[From John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy:]

"If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its chances, and the present [1852] state of society with all its sufferings and injustices; if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence, that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour—the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in a descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life; if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance.

But to make the comparison applicable, we must compare Communism at its best, with the régime of individual property, not as it is, but as it might be made. The principle of private property has never yet had a fair trial in any country; and less so, perhaps, in this country than in some others. The social arrangements of modern Europe commenced from a distribution of property which was the result, not of just partition, or acquisition by industry, but of conquest and violence: and notwithstanding what industry has been doing for many centuries to modify the work of force, the system still retains many and large traces of its origin. The laws of property have never yet conformed to the principles on which the justification of private property rests. They have made property of things which never ought to be property, and absolute property where only a qualified property ought to exist. They have not held the balance fairly between human beings, but have heaped impediments upon some, to give advantage to others; they have purposely fostered inequalities, and prevented all from starting fair in the race. That all should indeed start on perfectly equal terms, is inconsistent with any law of private property: but if as much pains as has been taken to aggravate the inequality of chances arising from the natural working of the principle, had been taken to temper that inequality by every means not subversive of the principle itself; if the tendency of legislation had been to favour the diffusion, instead of the concentration of wealth—to encourage the subdivision of the large masses, instead of striving to keep them together; the principle of individual property would have been found to have no necessary connexion with the physical and social evils which almost all Socialist writers assume to be inseparable from it.

Private property, in every defence made of it, is supposed to mean the guarantee to individuals of the fruits of their own labour and abstinence. The guarantee to them of the fruits of the labour and abstinence of others, transmitted to them without any merit or exertion of their own, is not of the essence of the institution, but a mere incidental consequence, which, when it reaches a certain height, does not promote, but conflicts with, the ends which render private property legitimate. To judge of the final destination of the institution of property, we must suppose everything rectified, which causes the institution to work in a manner opposed to that equitable principle, of proportion between remuneration and exertion, on which in every vindication of it that will bear the light, it is assumed to be grounded. We must also suppose two conditions realized, without which neither Communism nor any other laws or institutions could make the condition of the mass of mankind other than degraded and miserable. One of these conditions is universal education; the other, a due limitation of the numbers of the community. With these there could be no poverty, even under the present social institutions: and these being supposed, the question of Socialism is not, as generally stated by Socialists, a question of flying to the sole refuge against the evils which now bear down humanity; but a mere question of comparative advantages, which futurity must determine. We are too ignorant either of what individual agency in its best form, or Socialism in its best form, can accomplish, to be qualified to decide which of the two will be the ultimate form of human society.

If a conjecture may be hazarded, the decision will probably depend mainly on one consideration, viz. which of the two systems is consistent with the greatest amount of human liberty and spontaneity. After the means of subsistence are assured, the next in strength of the personal wants of human beings is liberty; and (unlike the physical wants, which as civilization advances become more moderate and more amenable to control) it increases instead of diminishing in intensity, as the intelligence and the moral faculties are more developed. The perfection both of social arrangements and of practical morality would be, to secure to all persons complete independence and freedom of action, subject to no restriction but that of not doing injury to others: and the education which taught or the social institutions which required them to exchange the control of their own actions for any amount of comfort or affluence, or to renounce liberty for the sake of equality, would deprive them of one of the most elevated characteristics of human nature. It remains to be discovered how far the preservation of this characteristic would be found compatible with the Communistic organization of society."

Lessons from the anti-library

Bjørn Stærk — Thu, 17 May 2007 13:39:00 +0200

No book better summarizes what I've been reading and thinking about in the last couple of years than Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which I reviewed in 2005. Fooled by Randomness was a work of practical philosophy, using examples from the financial world to attack the layers of illusory knowledge that we build on top of random events around us.

The financial world is a good place to find such layers, with its simplifications and retroactive explanations. Lucky traders become "geniuses", unexpected up- and downturns are found to be "inevitable", and the bell curve is assumed to be a fundamental property of reality. But this process of make-belief is not restricted to finance, it is universal. We do it to our lives, and we do it to the world we live in.

In The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Taleb continues this theme of uncertainty and the illusion of expert knowledge. It is a better, deeper book, and less likely than Fooled by Randomness to be mistaken for financial advice. It is a book about skepticism, wild randomness and the power of stories. It's about how not to be a sucker to the unexpected and the unknown.

From 'Pantagrueline Prognostication for 1533'

Bjørn Stærk — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 09:36:00 +0200

"This year, the blind will see very little; the deaf will be very hard of hearing; the dumb will hardly speak; the rich will keep themselves somewhat better than the poor, and the healthy than the sick. Many sheep, oxen, pigs, geese, pullets and ducks will die, whilst among monkeys and dromedaries the mortality will be less cruel. Old age will prove incurable this year because of the years gone by. Sufferers from pleurisy will have great pains in their sides; those who suffer from a runny belly will frequently go to the jakes; this year catarrhs will flow down from the brain to the lower limbs; and there will all but universally reign an illness most horrible, redoubtable, malignant, perverse, frightening and nasty which will so confuse everybody that they will never known what wood to use for their arrows, and will often madly write treatises in which they argue about the philosopher's stone; Averroës (in Book Seven of the Colliget) calls it Shortage of cash."
- Francois Rabelais, Pantagrueline Prognostication for 1533