2

“Good Morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it....

"What do you mean?" said Gandalf. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"

"All of them at once," said Bilbo.

      The Hobbit

A very clever monkey can sometimes work out that if he makes the sign for "want" and the sign for "banana" there is a very good chance that his keeper will give him a banana. 

But human language is more complicated than that. A group of words means something different from what those words mean individually. And that meaning can't be found on a look-up table. It has to do with who is speaking, and who is listening, and where the conversation is happening, and in what tone of voice, and what was said earlier in the conversation, and what was meant by that particular group of words the last 99 times someone said them.

What do the words "I am going to make you an offer you can't refuse" mean?

1: I am going to make you an offer you can't refuse

2: I am going to kill your favourite horse and put the severed head on your pillow

3: I am big fan of 1970s gangster movies

I assume that the answer is "All of them together".

Hobbits understand this kind of thing. Wizards, monkeys and biologists seem not to. Wizards pretend that they can only hear the literal meaning of what you say to them. Words mean what words mean and nothing else. Teach these boys and girls facts; facts alone are what is wanted in life. Try telling a Wizard that, at the end of the day, what makes a good school is happy children and devoted teachers, and the Wizard will ask if those things are not equally important in the morning? (I have mentioned Mr Simon Heffer's guide to the English language before in these column. It is very funny indeed.)

A sensible person might perfectly well criticize "at the end of the day" on stylistic grounds: it's a cliché, it calls to mind a particular kind of sports journalists, and my comment would read better if I'd found a fresher way of expressing it. But at the end of the day, the reality is that the vast majority of people up and down the country would understand perfectly what you meant. ("We could have a very long discussion about what makes a good school, and that discussion would go on all day, but I feel sure that we would eventually reach the following conclusion....") Only a wizard could be confused by it. 

If I were to say "Hello, hello, hello: what's all this then?" I think that most Hobbits would be able to work out what the words mean. They mean something like "I have noticed you, and I want to make it clear that I am keeping and eye on you, although you haven't done anything wrong so far." But if someone does say that, it's most unlikely that that is what they mean. The words, taken together, send out a sort of signal, and they signify something along the lines of: "I am a very old fashioned police officer." But it is most unlikely that they mean that, either. Most likely, they are signalling something like "I am a character in a play which is so old fashioned that the policemen still use this kind of cliché," or, more succinctly, "Ladies and gentlemen, please do not take this play too seriously."  You can't find this out by looking up the word "Hello" in the dictionary, or studying its etymology. You can only find it out by knowing about plays and policemen. The words don't mean what they mean. There isn't anything but social context.

People sometimes use the expression "dog whistles" to describe the practice of planting phrases, innocuous in themselves, into political speeches, which the specific intention of signalling "I am on your side" to a particular segment of their audience. The late Michael Gove communicated almost entirely in signals of this kind. His actual theories about faith schools, classroom management and the examination system were more or less irrelevant: but speeches which contained words like "detention...lines...prefects...latin...eleven plus...bible...common entrance exam" signaled to some of his listeners "I am an old fashioned, nostalgic chap who thinks that everything was better in the olden days. Please make me leader of the Conservative Party." 

It may sometimes happen that someone accidentally sends out a signal of this kind without really meaning to. If you do this, the best thing to do is to say "Whoops, sorry, that wasn't what I meant at all". (If the speaker does this, the best thing for everybody else to do is to assume he's telling the truth.) Perhaps I am convinced that a group of Jewish people in Bristol are planning to vote together at a PTA meeting to make local schools celebrate Hanukkah instead of Christmas. Perhaps I am right. Stranger things have happened. But it would be silly of me to describe the situation as a "Jewish conspiracy". Because the words "Jewish" and "Conspiracy" together signal "I believe in a secret Zionist plot to rule the universe" or more succinctly "I am a racist idiot." 

"Oh, Andrew, so now I am a racist for pointing out that Mr Abrahams and Mr Cohen and Mr Joseph always vote together at school board meetings? But it's true. I can prove that it's true."

I daresay you can. But, by accident or design, you chose to use antisemitic language to express yourself. If it was by accident, then apologize and rephrase your concern using a less loaded phrase. Otherwise, I will continue to believe that you are a racist idiot. Or, at any rate, a wizard.

Read: Where Dawkins Went Wrong --  The Book

1

English is my native language. My words mean what I intend. If you read them differently because of "social context" that's your problem.
               Prof Richard Dawkins

Analogy is to a man arguing on the internet as a banana skin on the pavement is to a fat lady in a silent comedy.

In 2012, One Of Those Clergymen was reported as having said that gay marriage was just as wicked as slavery. He won an award for being the most homophobic man in the UK.

Naturally, this wasn't quite what he had said. What he had said was that his church though gay sex was taboo, on religious grounds, and that he didn't agree with gay people getting married as that gave religious approval to the taboo thing. (He may not have phrased it in quite such temperate language.) People told him that this was okay; he was entitled to his beliefs; no church was going to have to solemnize same-sex marriages if it didn't want to. He retorted that this was neither here nor there: you can't defend legalizing a bad thing on the ground that you aren't making the bad thing compulsory. 

And he was quite right. You can't. "X is not compulsory" is no kind of a response to "X should not be permitted." If you are against bringing back slavery, then you are against bringing back slavery even if you personally won't have to own any slaves if you don't want to. 

Rilstone's third law states that when someone says something very stupid, the internet will immediately claim that they said a different very stupid thing. Rilstone's second law states that the person who points this out will immediately be suspected of agreeing with the very stupid thing that the original person didn't say. When I suggested that, well, no, Father O'Bigot hadn't really said that gays were as wicked as slave owners, the Spartist wing of my fan-base claimed that I was using the concept of analogy to "give him a pass".

I am not entirely sure what "give him a pass" means. We don't use the expression in this country. I think it has to do with American school children getting permission to leave the classroom to go to the toilet.

It is very clear that Father O'Bigot had, in fact, said something very stupid. The analogy between slave-ownership and allowing gay couples to get married in church is a tenuous one. If it is wrong to own slaves, then it is wrong for anyone to own slaves, because slave ownership does obvious harm, mostly to slaves. If you personally believe that gay sex is taboo then it is hard to see how other people doing the taboo thing harms anyone else. (When the equal marriage debate was at its silliest, some religious groups attempted to claim that allow gay couples to get married would somehow make straight couples less married: I don't understand what they meant, and still don't.) 

And he deliberately chose an incendiary example. If what you want to have is a  discussion as opposed to a shouting match, then incendiary examples are not terribly helpful. And if your example is sufficiently toxic, well, naturally, everyone is going to focus on the example, rather than the substantive point, however valid the substantive point might be. If an MP says "I think that Prime Minister should roll up his sleeves and the give the striking dock workers a jolly good black eye, just as he would to his own wife if he got home and she didn't have his dinner ready" then I don't think we would be very surprised if the story in the papers the next day was that an MP appeared to take wife-beating for granted. Even if he had a good point about prosecuting the strikers with utmost severity.  

So. The question before us today is whether or not Prof Richard Dawkins should be allowed to visit the bathroom over his recent twitter pronouncements about sexual assault and pedophilia. 

Read: Where Dawkins Went Wrong -- The Book

Gone out

Backson.

Bisy backson.

I wroted a book, I did, truthfully.

You can buy it from Lulu right now, and from Amazon eventually. 

If you want to tell me how clever I am, maybe you could do it over here? 





P.S There are also RECORDINGS of me speaking words in my voice

Fluffy Bunnies

The Rabbits of Watership Down are rabbits. They are as rabbitty as Richard Adams can make them. Everything they do is based on real rabbit behaviour. However, Mr Adams asks us to imagine -- well, not imagine, but take for granted as a scholarly fact -- that these rabbits have human intelligence, culture, language, even religion. Well no, not these rabbits -- rabbits in general, and foxes, and sea gulls. How this works we can’t question for a moment. (Could a leoporine mouth even form the syllables El-ahrairah? Is a rabbit brain big enough to develop that kind of consciousness?) It’s funny, actually, how easily our mind accepts this kind of thing. It gets you into philosophical hot water if you aren’t incredibly careful. If a rabbit or a hamster had human consciousness, then obviously vivesection would be wrong. I think Richard Adams develops this fallacy at some length in his later books.

Peter Rabbit is also a rabbit, possibly with a fly upon his nose. And the anthropomorphosiation has gone a lot further than it has in Watership Down. He wears clothes. His daddy smokes a pipe, forsooth. But he also lives in a whole, and steals cabbages from a farmers garden, and if I remember correctly there is an implication that the farmer has sometimes made his relatives into pies. If Watership Down asks us to imagine a world in which rabbits have human minds, the Peter Rabbit books asks us to imagine a world in which, instead of Rabbits, there are tiny, Rabbit shaped people.

Again, we don’t have any trouble getting our heads around this. We don’t say for goodness sake they have culture and language and you are going to put them in a pie what kind of wierdo are you?

The Hare in Aesops Fable is in a lot of ways less animal like than either Hazel and Fiver or Peter Rabbit. I mean, we take it for granted that tortoises and hares can communicate, and place bets, and that owls can adjudicate, and so on and so forth. Peter Rabbit is doing Rabbity things, even if he wears a tam o shanter. You never saw a hare behave remotely like that. But I suppose it doesn’t count; it’s not really a story; it’s just a proverb, with the Hare representing “fast thing” and the tortoise representing “slow thing.”.

Bugs Bunny isn’t a rabbit. In fact the only rabbity thing about him his the carrot, and that is pretty much only there to be a place holder for a cigar, so that he can be a sort of caricature of Groucho Marx. He isn’t even really rabbit shaped, any more than one of those childs drawings of a cat looks anything like a cat. But we sort of accept that that’s the way rabbits look in cartoons. In the days when people used to watch Walt Disney cartoons, they used to ask “What Kind of An Animal Is Goofy”? The answer is, well, he isn’t really any kind of animal, and it wouldn’t make any difference if he was. I think there used to be a rabbit in the Disney Mythos, but it was retconned out during the crisis. There is a famous example of false memory syndrome in which subjects are persuaded to believe that they met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, even though Bugs Bunny isn’t owned by Disney, or wasn’t then. But cartoons are probably a different thing and I have run out of rabbits.

Okay, then, bears. Paddington Bear is clearly not a bear. He wears clothes, talks English and although he causes chaos wherever he goes, its the sort of chaos that a very naughty child would cause, not the sort of chaos that would occur if a large South American carnivore got loose on and English Railway station. There is pretty much nothing bear like about him at all. There is a vague memory of the fact that bears (proverbially) like honey in Paddington’s liking for marmalade, I suppose.

Does anyone but me remember Mary Plain? She was a sort of proto-Paddington, a two legged bear who could talk English living in a suburban home. But she mostly did human things -- enter fancy dress competitions, join the boy scouts, and, after the series had jumped the entirely non anthropomorphic shark, solved a mystery and get shipwrecked on a desert island.

I suppose Yogi bear is more like Peter Rabbit. He wears clothes and talks and can interact with the human world when he needs to, but he retains one specific bear-type attribute: he lives on a nature reserve, and steals goodies from visitors picnics.

The least bear like of all is Rupert the Bear (everyone sing his name). He is, basically, not a bear. He isn’t even a teddy bear. He is twelve year old boy with a bear’s head; whose friends are twelve year old children with elephants heads and badgers heads. I don’t recall that he even particularly likes honey. Cartoonist Alfred Bestall said that you couldn’t ever send Rupert to the seaside, because putting Rupert in a bathing costume would force you to address the question of weather he is furry all over.




One can see the point of Yogi Bear being Yogi Bear rather than Yogi Naughty Petty Thief Man. His relationship to the touritsts, on the one paw, and the park ranger, on the other, sort of reflects that of an actual bear to and actual tourist. (On my one visit to an American national park I was warned to hang any food out of reach of the bears or put it in a metal crate, so evidentally its a thing.) It’s like Tom and Jerry who are really cat like and mouse like only in so far as the former chases the latter. But what’s the point of making the comical protagonist of Paddington a bear shaped child, rather than, say, a child?




I never quite understood why clever men like C.S Lewis and A.A Milne and Pink Floyd were quite so keen on WInd in the Willows. I’m not sure I ever got to the end of it. I think Lewis was right about why Mr Toad had to be a toad rather than and English country gentleman, even though he’s obviously an English country gentleman and not a toad. If he was a human, he would have to have servants and employees and we’d have to at least have a hint about where his money came from. As long as he’s an animal, we can sort of skate over that. (Lewis thinks he’s both a child and an adult: a child in that food sort of just turns up and no-one asks where it came from; and adult in that he gets to choose what he wants to do and there’s no-one to tell him off.) And the shape of a toad’s face is a sort of fixed caricature of a certain kind of human. I don’t think that there is any reason to suppose that Owls are wise, particularly; I don’t even know if they are cleverer than other birds of prey. But they are always wise in stories because the big eyes look like we imagine a wise human ought to look. So stories about animal-shaped humans lend themselves to a kind of fable where everyone has a more or less fixed personality and it can’t really develop. (A.A Milne said that you only had to look at the toy pig and the toy donkey and the toy tiget to see their personalities -- timid and gloomy and bouncy.




In that sense, Star Trek is more like an animal fable than anything else, isn’t it? The different “races” representing a different fixed kind of human personality; or possibly a different aspect of one individuals make up -- The Klingon representing “The soldier” as much as The Owl represents “the Wise”. Which is why it’s so besider the point to read anti-semitism into Deep Space Nine.




But while this may be a literary effect of anthropomorphic animals, I don’t think it’s actually the reason. It is perfectly true that if a child behaved like Paddington Bear, he would get punished or injured or given pills. (If an adult behaved that way, he’d be arrested or put in a home.) This is not to say that you can’t do stories about naughty or accident prone children in a realistic setting, but they either have to get some sort of comeuppance, like Dennis the Menace, or they have to be devious enough to avoid it, like Just William, which introduces an element of cynicism which isn’t funny. Or which is funny in a different way: more sophisticated, less innocent. But I don’t suppose for one moment that Michael Bond said to himself that he wanted to write a story about the kind of child who floods the bathroom the first time he needs a wash, but then thought it wouldn’t be that funny if a child did that kind of thing and then thought I know I’ll make him a bear instead. He started to tell a story about a bear. That’s what’s odd, in way. Once we start to tell stories about bears or rabbits it somehow becomes natural that they wear duffle coats and tam o shanters and like honey and marmalade. We almost can’t look at an animal without anthropomorphising it.






I hope this has been helpful to all those who have been so seriously confused and perplexed by recent pronouncements. I admit that I was surprised to find out that Hello Kitty had a personality or backstory. I assumed it was just something that existed to be stamped on note paper and teeshirts. But I can’t see how anyone could possibly have been surprised by the information that Hello Kitty is not a cat. Of course it isn’t. Anymore than Bugs Bunny is a Rabbit or Pooh is a bear.

29 Nov 1898 - 22 Nov 1963

Dear Miss Douglas

Thanks for your kind note. Yes autumn is really the best of the seasons: and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life. But of course, like Autumn, it doesn't last.

Yours Sincerely

C.S Lewis

Letter dated "31 Sep 63"

Today's Guardian essay about C.S Lewis contained all the usual distortions by all the usual suspects. If anyone but me is still interested in the Historical Lewis, the following may possibly be helpful:

Sam Leith (journalist)

Susan appears to be punished for entering adolescence and develping an interest in lipstick by exclusion from what in the Narnia mythos passes for heaven.

C.S Lewis

"Susan is interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations."

      The Last Battle

*

A.S Byatt

There was a terrifying moment in the Screwtape Letters where the devil is trying to tempt somebody into thinking milk is disgusting because it comes from somewhere in the cow quite close to excrement. I think that was a personal thing of Lewis's I think he didn't like milk because he didn't like females.

C.S Lewis

Then I dreamed that one day there was nothing but milk for them, and the jailer said as he put down the pipkin. "Our relations with the cow are not delicate, as you can easily see if you imagine eating any of her other secretions."

"Thank heaven! Now I know you are talking nonsense."

"What do you mean?" said the jailer, wheeling round upon him.

"You are trying to make us believe that unlike things are like. You are trying to make us think that milk is the same sort of things as sweat or dung."

"And pray, what difference is there except by custom?"

"Are you a liar, or only a fool, that you see no difference between that which nature stores up as food and that which she casts out as refuse...?"

     The Pilgrim's Regress

*

Phillips Pullman

He pours scorn on little girls with fat legs....among Lewis's readers will be some little girls with fat legs who find themselves utterly bewildered by this slur on something they cants help and are embarrassed and upset by already.

C.S Lewis

Then (Miss Pizzle) saw the lion, screamed and fled, and with her fled he class, who were mostly prim, dumpy little girls with fat legs.

     Prince Caspian

*

A.N Wilson

For 33 years he shared his life with the woman he called Minto, Jane Moore. She was the love of his life.

George Sayer

Some of those who have written about C.S Lewis regard his living with Mrs Moore and Maureen as odd, even sinister. This was not the view of those of us who visited the Kilns in the thirties...Like other pupils I thought it completely normal in those days that a woman, probably a widow, would make a home for a young bachelor. We had no difficulty in excepting her, even when we came to realise that she was not his mother.

     C.S Lewis: His Life and Times

*

A.N Wilson

C.S Lewis hated all poets because he was a failed poet. He hated TS Eliot. He hated Louis MacNiece. There's a very bad 'poem' by Lewis about reading The Love Song of J ALfred Prufrock and it just shows how stupid he was about modern poetry.

C.S Lewis

I am so coarse, the things the poets see

Are obstinately invisible to me.

For twenty years I've stared my level best

To see if evening - any evening - would suggest

A patient etherized upon a table;

In vain. I simply wasn't able.

     A Confession

This 1929 satire is not Lewis's last word on modernism, as Wilson very well knows: 

C.S Lewis

To read the old poetry involved learning a slightly different language; to read the new involves the unmaking of your mind, the abandonment of all the logical and narrative connections which you use in reading prose or in conversation. You must achieve a trance-like condition in which images, associations, and sounds operate without these. Thus the common ground between poetry and any other use of words is reduced almost to zero. In that way poetry is now more quintessentially poetical than ever before; 'purer' in the negative sense. It not only does (like all good poetry) what prose can't do: it deliberately refrains from doing anything that prose can do.

     An Experiment in Criticism

Modern poetry is such that the cognoscenti who explicate it can read the same piece in utterly different ways. We can no longer assume all but one of these readings, or else all, to be 'wrong'. The poem, clearly, is like a score and the readings like performances. Different renderings are admissible. The question is not which is the 'right' one but which is the best. The explicators are more like conductors of an orchestra than members of an audience.

     Ibid.

In music we have pieces which demand more talent in the performer than in the composer. Why should there not come a period when the art of writing poetry stands lower than the art of reading it? Of course rival readings would then cease to be "right" or "wrong" and become more and less brilliant "performances".

     De Descriptione Temporum

I do not see in any of these the slightest parallel to the state of affairs disclosed by a recent symposium on Mr. Eliot's Cooking Egg. Here we find seven adults (two of them Cambridge men) whose lives have been specially devoted to the study of poetry discussing a very short poem which has been before the world for thirty-odd years; and there is not the slightest agreement among them as to what, in any sense of the word, it means. I am not in the least concerned to decide whether this state of affairs is a good thing, or a bad thing. I merely assert that it is a new thing.

    Ibid

if this sort of thing interests you then you could always buy my book on C.S Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien and related subjects....

Whoot, whoot!

FIVE HOURS TO GO

NEWSFLASH: The book will also contain rejigged and repurposed versions of the DVD reviews I did for Sci Fi Now -- they helpfully plug some of the gaps in my Whoblogging (mostly around Tennant's third season) and mean that the Viewer's Complete Tale will really be the Viewer's COMPLETE Tale.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1376208315/the-viewers-complete-tale

£2050 UNLOCKED -- Bookplate by folkbuddy Clarrie
£2150 UNLOCKED -- Internal illustrations by folkbuddy Clarrie
£2200 UNLOCKED-- Facsimiles of rare Rilstone Whovian juvenilia.
£2400 -- Cover by Whovian artist 2ndFADE
NEW £2500 -- Andrew will perform "The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon" on his ukulele

So basically...if you haven't pledged for the book yet, its looking like a nicer and nicer thing every minute...