More by Amos Oz

For anyone who is willing to listen and think there is more by Amos Oz in today's Guardian.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil...

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. The sentence is usually attributed to Burke though there is no evidence that he either said or wrote it. It isn't too wise to take the moral high ground about the actions of other states when you are a citizen of perfidious Albion. Brits above all others should beware of throwing stones in glass houses. However,  at the risk of upsetting dear friends and colleagues, I want to share this link to Amos Oz's comment on yesterday's Israeli military action  against civil shipping in international waters. I admire Oz  as a man, as a writer and as someone who fearlessly speaks truth to power (if you get a chance read his beautiful autobiography). It used to be that when he spoke Israel listened. I don't know whether that is the case any more but I do know there are many others like him in Israel who are appalled by what the state does in their name. They deserve our understanding and support.

In Praise of Google Books

In November of 1880 a 79 year old labourer died of lung congestion in Plymouth Township, Wayne County, Michigan. He was married, had entered the US from Canada two months earlier, and was known as St George William Dunlop Mills. He was my great great great grandfather. Why he had gone to the US from Canada is unknown. He emigrated from Co. Roscommon, Ireland to Canada some time before his second marriage in 1861 to Elizabeth Williamson, also an Irish immigrant. There are no surviving Irish birth, baptismal or marriage records, just a shadowy presence on the 1867 Glasgow marriage certificate of John Mills a son by his first marriage and on  John's 1894 Coatbridge death certificate where St George is described as a railway clerk. We get fleeting glimpses of his Canadian life from the 1861 and 1871 censuses and from Toronto street directories where he is listed as at different times working for the Toronto Street Railway - shown in the photograph above - and the city's waterworks. From 1875 through to 1879 he is listed as a labourer and then the trail ends in Michigan. 

This is most of what I know about  my ancestor apart from one intriguing detail - he appears to have been born to a well-off and  well connected county family. His father, Oliver Mills of Knockhall, was High Sheriff of Roscommon in 1798  - the year of the rebellion and the  ill-fated French invasion. His mother Emma (Amy) Massy was the daughter of the 1st Baron Massy of Duntrileague, MP for Limerick County,  raised to the Irish Peerage in 1776. Given this auspicious start  why did he end his life a day labourer? Of course in the Nineteenth Century old-age often meant severely reduced circumstances even for the well-born. But now, thanks to the miracle of the internet, I know there was more to it than that.

Last week, while idly searching on Google Books, I came across a report of a court case in a volume with the title: Irish Equity Reports, of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery, the Roll Court and the Equity Exchequer During the Years 1846 and 1847. It details in five densely worded pages the judgment in the case of Mills v. Mills an intra family dispute that appears to have been initiated in 1811. Not being a lawyer some of the details of the case are rather obscure to me but in true Jarndyce versus Jarndyce fashion it revolves around the terms of a will and the rights to income from land. The parties to the dispute are Emma Mills (née Massy) my great great great great grandmother and George Mills her stepson, half brother of my great great great grandfather  St George William Dunlop Mills. The case seems to end with the court appointing a receiver to sell the land which lies at the centre of the dispute. Dickens has one of his characters say of Chancery: "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!". I wonder if the Mills fortune went the same way as the Jarndyce?

The moral of my story is not however to bemoan the hard times that subsequently befell the family but to celebrate Google Books. Without it I would never have known of the existence of Mills v Mills. In and of itself this is of no significance  to anyone but me, however the ability to bring together and make available hitherto unrelated facts is potentially of tremendous importance for the growth of knowledge. Amongst other things books contain lots of discrete pieces of  information - for want of a better word - facts. Google Books makes it much easier to link these together, to turn facts into knowledge and to increase the power of serendipity.

Evidence based policy

As usual, an excellent post by Ben Goldacre on the need for evidence based social policy. We all know that RCTs are difficult to set up in many social policy contexts, but difficult is not the same as impossible. Often it just requires that politicians have the balls to say that unless you want to sit around waiting for an instrument to be provided by the Gods of Natural Experiments the choice is either ignorance or randomization. If you don't like the latter then you have to believe that the cost of ignorance is smaller than the cost of knowledge. It's a perfectly consistent position but I have no idea how anyone could claim to know that the status quo is superior to an alternative without ascertaining the facts of the matter.

It's a hard life

On Saturday we watched Michael Haneke's Das weisse Band: Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte. I had already seen it once before but I was surprised at how much detail I'd missed first time round, for example the subtitle and its orthography are significant. The greatness of the film is actually in the detail and in the refusal to provide a neat explanation of the events that drive the plot. This is what prevents it just being a facile allegory of whatever aspects of later German history you want to project it onto. OK, it is a movie about Germany, but it is more than that. As the great Nanci Griffith puts it:

And if we poison our children with hatred

Then, the hard life is all  that they'll know.

Election Special 3

One of my daughter's favourite picture story books is the delightful Es klopft bei Wanja in der Nacht (roughly 'A knock on the door in the night at Wanja's').
Wanja lives alone in a cabin deep in the forest. One night there is a terrible snow storm and after he has gone to bed he hears a knock at the door. He gets up and on opening it is surprised to see a hare who begs to be let in out of the storm. Wanja is a good natured soul and lets the hare come into the warm; Der Wanja sagt: "Komm nur herein, ich heize gleich im Ofen ein". Not long afterwards there is another knock at the door. Again Wanja gets up and this time finds a poor fox with frozen toes begging to be let in. Naturally the hare is a bit nervous about this arrangement but the good hearted Wanja extracts from the fox a promise to behave himself and all three settle down for the night. Not long afterwards there is a third knock at the door and  who should be there but a bear who is so cold that he can't stop his teeth from chattering. Now it is the fox who is reluctant to admit the new visitor - a fortnight earlier he stole some meat from the bear and is afraid that he has come to get even. The bear swears that he is harmless, Wanja lets him in and everyone settles down for the night in peace and harmony: Doch drinnen schlafen wohl geborgen Fuchs, Bär und Hase bis zum Morgen.

As morning  breaks the hare is first to wake. The storm has blown itself out. His heart is hammering and he thinks to himself that perhaps the fox's stomach will get the better of his good intentions so he better get off. Next the fox wakes up and realising that the bear may still be angry with him also goes on his way. The bear is nice and warm in his corner but when he eventually wakes he sees, hanging on the wall, Wanja's rifle and realises that he is sleeping in a hunter's cabin and that it would be best if he also slipped away. The last to rise is Wanja:

Der Wanja - noch vom Schlaf umfangen -

begreift nicht, was hier vorgegangen.

Er blickt umher im leeren Raum.

War den das alles nur ein Traum?

Doch draußen sieht er von drei Tieren

die Spuren sich in Schnee verlieren.

Der Wanja schaut und nickt und lacht:

"Wir haben wirklich diese Nacht

gemeinsam friedlich zugebracht. -

Was so ein Schneesturm alles macht!"

Frazer strikes back, but Malinowski wins on a knockout

Browsing the LSE's website to see what their political experts had to say about the election I had the misfortune to come across this blurb for the forthcoming Malinowski Memorial Lecture. It reminded me of why I chose to leave that place -  too much completely hypocritical tolerance of this sort of thing. I was continually dismayed by the number of smart people who in private were prepared to say what they thought but in public kept their mouths shut and their noses clean. Before you start berating and flaming me I confess that all I know about the talk is what is written in the abstract so I haven't given the guy a fair shake, but let's face it, the signs aren't good. I quote:

"...is it a mistake to take our interest in an ethnographic phenomenon in the direction of an empirical investigation, when what is really needed with respect to its clarity is an imaginative contemplation of it? It is my overall argument that this is indeed the case and that the Malinowskian recourse to empirical evidence as the ultimate criterion for anthropological knowledge is misguided."

"...I take two classical topics - the ‘soul’ and ‘ritual blood sacrifice’. I will show how both are essentially metaphysical issues, not empirical ones. Understanding them, therefore, is not a question of advancement in the actual material practice of fieldwork, but of the power of the scholar's speculative imagination."

Souls are non empirical, in fact non existent, entities. The only way that anyone can say anything about them is via a process that involves imagination. Ditto for Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy. That doesn't make them material for the social scientist, it makes them material for novelists, poets, theologians and all the others whose business it is to attempt to express the inexpressible. Whether they succeed or not is a matter of individual opinion not science. Tony Harrison says something to me, he may do nothing for you and I certainly won't be advocating that he is given a chair in sociology. Ritual blood sacrifice is, at least for those involved in it I would imagine, an all too empirical experience. Of course you can try to tell me, perhaps on the basis of your imagination, what the soul or ritual blood sacrifice means to Siberia's indigenous people. I may or may not  comprehend or "get a feeling" for it. It probably depends on how good your and my imagination is. I think, that through reading L. P. Hartley's The Go Between, I have an inkling of what it was like to be a child staying as a guest in an Edwardian upper-class country house during a long hot Summer and vicariously finding out about sex for the first time. Do I really understand what it was like? Almost certainly not. And even if I did I couldn't prove it to you. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. That is the point of the novel. Social science has limits and it does nobody any good to try and pretend that it is the social scientist's business to stray outside the limits they are competent to speak about. If I have time I'm happy to read poems about mystical experiences or watch a film like Tarkovsky's Mirror which is undeniably 'spiritual' but when I'm doing that I'm not doing social science. Let the metaphysicians do the metaphysics and the social scientists the social science. As Frank Ramsey said in his succinct version of Wittgenstein. 'What we can't say, we can't say, and we can't whistle it either.'