Book Notes: "Utilitarianism" by John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill (c. 1870). Photo via Wikimedia/Public Domain.

Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The trouble with Mill is that you if read a few of his then-contemporary critics, and then you think you have his measure with all your modern day access to knowledge, but all along he was throwing "mind grenades" set on "delay" and they sit in your head while you go on thinking you are rather smart. So Mill mentions the Stoics and how virtue is only a means to happiness and that there are other things, too. He mentions the Sophists and how Socrates (allegedly) challenged their ancient equivalent of what is happening in higher education today. But in mentioning the development of utilitarianism from Epicurus to Bentham (and unfortunately I have not read Bentham cover-to-cover as I will do in the future), so just when I think to myself: "Mill, you really are 'drawing a long bow here' [a favourite saying of one of my favourite professors]", the mind grenade goes off and my hubris is dashed and I am glad I didn't say it out loud but there you have it - it was certainly there. There is no mention of Aristotle and the "golden mean" and how achieving a mean across the spectrum of virtues achieves happiness, but, as Mill says, there are many things that amount to happiness in addition to leading a virtuous life, so bringing up Aristotle doesn't make a good deal of sense. One interesting aspect of the essay is the long note in the last few pages where Mill extends a good deal of courtesy to Herbert Spencer, someone I have read more about in Jack London's Martin Eden than I ever did in all the other secondary sources I have read put together. While Mill does not quite agree with Spencer, Spencer claims (according to Mill) that he was never against the doctrine of utilitarianism. So the Greatest Happiness Principle it is but if we do not also take into account Mill's ideas of liberty (in On Liberty), then the present-day situation where we are told what to like and what will make us happy and many of us go along with that and eat our smashed avocado, living in our high density housing, and paying for cups of coffee that we could make at home for a fraction of the price, which are not only much better, but we could also be happier because we were actually doing something for ourselves, while, as Tolstoy or even my mother would say, "in reality", we are succumbing to the biggest scam ever and then wondering why we are not happy at all. And J.S. Mill says all this in just under 122 pages of thick paper dating from 1895, which is nice, but with each cover-to-cover completion of classic works I edge ever-closer to the abyss of what I don't know and it scares me.

View all my reviews

Left-Right; Right-Left: How about a fourth revolution?

The state triumphant? Jean Duplessis-Bertaux's "Retour de Varennes. Arrivée de Louis Seize à Paris, le 25 juin 1791" (1791) via Wikimedia.

Today I read respected economist John Quiggin's latest in "Governments are buying up where the market has failed. Is this the end of privatisation?" via the TJ Ryan Foundation website.  Apparently, privatisation has failed because the government decided to start buying back infrastructure. Given the article appeared in The Guardian, you will excuse me for being a little sceptical about this trumpeting of the state's triumphant return to delivering services.

Poor regulation is not the fault of businesses. Indeed, there are some major problems that government brought about all by itself: forgetting to structurally separate Telstra before selling it off, then wanting to buy part of it back through NBN, and let's not forget the roof insulation debacle. 

None of these problems were caused by market failure. Clearly, these were government failures. Political reactions that buy back the farm are about winning elections and little else. It is a far cry from a failure of the free market.

Not that Quiggin says all of these things, but he does seem to be against privatisation. But being against privatisation, where government sells the farm and then promises to irrigate it and weed it and harvest it and then give all the proceeds to the private sector, is not the same thing as market failure.

Market failure occurs where the private sector is unable to provide goods and services at a profit. Broadband services to remote communities is a case in point.

But this is where ideology comes in. Rather than funding, transparently and directly, the actual cost of services to remote communities, it must be cross-subsidised. This means that the true cost of providing to the bush is hidden, and the costs of inefficiencies are buried in monoliths like NBN Co.

And while Quiggin acknowledges that this is not a return to socialism (or, more appropriately, social democracy), given that land titles offices are to be leased out (NSW) or sold (SA), it is largely a return to nationalisation of particular industries. This has happened time and again in the UK, Australia, and Canada, and so on with telegraphs and railways and other services, especially during war time. (There is even talk of the ACT Government buying back Canberra Stadium so it can bulldoze it to the ground and then build its own stadium - again - in Civic. But remember the original debacle that was Bruce Stadium?)

Quiggin notes that Pauline Hanson is using citizens' dissatisfaction with the private sector (which governments get blamed for anyway) and combining this with racism - a form of left-right politics where public ownership is combined with right-wing social policies.

The Hawke government, which introduced the majority of the reforms based on economic liberalism (or economic rationalism as it was known here), had more of a right-left agenda. Since Howard, we seem to be stuck in a race to the conservative right, or centre-conservative/right² ideology - the biggest government in history, pretending to be a small government, touting freedom while taking away the rights and freedoms of citizens more than ever.  

I made a joke to my class the other day about living in Australia versus living in the developing world. In many developing world countries, you can do whatever you like as long as you do not criticise the government, In Australia, you can criticise the government all you like but you are not allowed to do anything.

What has never been tried is a liberal-liberal approach. Imagine a free market with same-sex marriage, free trade agreements with universal health care and education, market competition for goods and services in the metropolitan areas and government-provided services in the frontier areas.

The trouble is not privatisation, but a half-baked attempt at it. And it isn't the same thing as libertarianism a la Ron Paul. Regulations are necessary. But should the government really have anything to do with holding back same-sex marriage? This has nothing to do with government.

But before we think that re-nationalisation is a new turn in politics, don't forget Kevin Rudd's essay in The Monthly on the Global Financial Crisis back in 2009. Choosing one economic orthodoxy over another is all history has witnessed since before the Great Depression.

Re-nationalising has been done before, and it will be done again. And it will be undone again, too. But what is missing is not the right economic policy, it is the right combination of economic AND social policies. Why liberal economics can't work with liberal social policy we may not know until it has been attempted. And whether this can produce better results than China's emerging model is another story.

While much of the above is a stream of thought, I have a few ideas of what to do about it. First, I might follow up on a recent Lapham's Quarterly podcast where John Micklethwait talks about his co-authored book (with Adrian Wooldridge) The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State. (Lapham's Quarterly is the magazine I have always longed for, and Lewis Lapham is like the Mortimer and Adler of "Great Podcasts". If you don't subscribe yet and you are into politics or history, then this is the duck's!)

Second, I need to consider rating policy decision such as Snowy 2.0, NBN, electricity, South Australia's great big Elon Musk battery, and so on, and putting together a quantitative paper. Some of Patrick Dunleavy's recent work might serve as an example.

But why oh why we can't have liberal economics and liberal social policy I will never know. And while I don't even pretend to have the temerity to critique Quiggin's views, I think there is something to be said for the paradigms that continue to wax and wane in the economy and society. 

That this all began in 1776 with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, in his argument for market liberalism, together with the United States Declaration of Independence, also from 1776, and its focus on political "liberty", provides an interesting starting point for an historical argument about the never-quite-coming together of these two ideals: liberty-liberty.

Note: See also William Hogeland's (2017) Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West via Lapham's Quarterly.

Book Notes: "The Odyssey" by Homer

Alexander's Pope's translation of "The Odyssey" (1752). Source: Wikimedia.

The Odyssey by Homer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Generally, I accept my lot in life and I really do enjoy my fate. Amor Fati. Then I read books like this, where after pages of frustration I am shaking with rage and I want to don my armour and take my stand with Odysseus and slay that pack of pissweak suitors for behaving like hyaenas over my unprotected hearth. I have to stand and walk as I read, angry at my young self for wasting all those years being an idiot, angry at my lot in life for not making me a Rhodes scholar, enabling me to speak and read every language on earth, read every great book ever written, while waves of adrenalin course through my chest, my back and shoulders tensing with my hands shaking as I read furiously, my body lunges with each spear thrust, getting frustrated at being unable to read because of the shaking, and passion compounds passion and I read so fast I start stumbling over words and have to slow myself down. The book ends and I sit down. And then I get cranky at Hollywood for all its bullshit, cranky that the story was never told as it was written. Cranky that the Trojan horse gets bare mention yet it becomes the central story of every recreation since, and then cranky that I didn't know that's because it was Virgil's The Aeneid where the details came from. And as the coursing anger subsides, the Homeric epics give me a glimpse of real life, and real heroes. They suffer doubt and frustration and anguish and shame and lose their courage. They are not super heroes who can never lose and they are not in control of their destinies and the gods play their part and one's fate happens and it is only one's inward citadel that can never be broached if we won't allow it to be. Unless we accept a Trojan horse as a gift. Thank God for Homer, whoever he (or they) may have been.

View all my reviews

Revenue Reform: Fuel Excise and Road Pricing: Guest Lecture at ANZSOG

Revenue Reform: Fuel Excise and Road Pricing from University of Canberra

©Depositphotos.com/@alexandragl

Day two back at work after long service leave and today I was back in the saddle.

The edited book on road pricing is now in its final stages and I am working on an academic paper on the impact of the 1954 Privy Council decision to remove the protection of state-owned railways.

Always enthusiastic students and the discussions could go on forever if we could only rid ourselves of timetables!

Podcasts: Back to the Future

I remember a few years back, a friend of mine was wearing headphones as she walked around the campus. She stopped and said to me: "I'm just listening to you on a podcast".

It was the podcast of Triple J's Hack on 4th October 2010 and I was talking about the "My Lecturer" website. It was going to be the greatest thing but then it fell flat. It was good experience with the news media. And being on Hack is kind of a landmark for wannabe academics. I was on Hack again in 3rd August 2011 talking about "The Battle of the Broadband". I'd really made the big time!

The podcasts are long gone, but I remember being surprised that anyone was listening to podcasts, let alone one that had me on it. And then podcasts seemed to die their natural death and that was the end of it.

But something happened. I think it must have been the iPhone and other smartphones that finally enabled people to download podcasts on the go, rather than transferring them from a website or feed to an iPod. I am certain this is what started the revival.

I had deliberately rid myself of a mobile phone after my sabbatical in Jordan in late 2009. I lasted until the 6th November 2015 when we moved to Gunning. The one-hour commute meant that not having a smartphone was asking for trouble if the car broke down. Not only letting people know I couldn't make a meeting, but being able to call the NRMA forced it back on me.

Mercedes 300E. The greatest car ever built. Well, I think so!

But I did last six years without one. The Campus Review's "Blog Rankings" even did an article about it on 16 April 2012: "Ditching the phone for the blog".

For my commute, I first went to the Gunning Library and tried CD audio books. My 1987 model Mercedes 300E doesn't have bluetooth. Thankfully.

I listened to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. It had me in stitches when the narrator switched from Hemingway to the Old Lady:

Hemingway: "Sonorous baritone, masculine blahdy-blah [even though my actual voice wouldn't be an audio book competition winner]"...

Old Lady: "Oh, squeaky falsetto, castrado mea culpa!"

It was so good I listened to it twice through. The next was an historical novel about Ancient Greece. I couldn't bear the thought of listening to a book I wanted to read. This particular audio book lasted just a few minutes. It sounded like the the crew from The Late Show and it was exactly like Piss Weak World:

So that ended. Then I burnt podcasts onto CDs until the CD player started to stick. And finally, the USB charger and a cable directly into the auxiliary jack and now I have podcasts galore. It is excellent use of my commuting time and there is so much variety. And to think that podcasts almost died.

So now I am planning on creating my own podcast. Stay tuned. I hope to get my first done in the coming months and release by Stitcher.

Matthew Sharpe: Stoicism 5.0: The unlikely 21st century reboot of an ancient philosophy

Jacques-Louis David's "La morte di Seneca" (1773). Source: Wikimedia.

From Cynicism to Stoicism

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition, to paraphrase Monty Python.

We live in strange times. But few people could have expected today’s rise of a global movement of self-describing Stoic online communities numbering over 100,000 participants.

Stoicism was the ancient Greek and then Roman philosophy founded in the last decades of the fourth century BCE by a merchant, Zeno of Citium (modern Cyprus). The latter’s vessel had sunk on route to Athens, taking Zeno’s cargo down with it.

Zeno, it is said, made his way up to the Athenian agora. There, with his few remaining coins, he bought and read a copy of Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates. “Where can I find a man like this?”, he is supposed to have asked the bookseller.

Zeno was pointed towards one Crates, a philosopher from the Cynical school. The Cynics were a kind of radical break-away group from the circles surrounding the Platonic Academy and Aristotelian Lyceum. The Cynics claimed to live “according to nature”. They completely shunned social conventions and lived as simply as dogs (kynes), whence the name.

Some years later, Zeno founded his own school. He would deliver lectures to the public on the steps of Athens’ painted Stoa (whence “Stoicism”, aka “the porch”), whose foundations today lie half-concealed beneath surrounding restaurants.

The painted Stoa today where Stoicism began in the 5th century BCE.

What all this has to do with men and women in the internet age, outside of classics departments, is another thing.

When this author has from time to time spoken on issues around the Stoic conception that philosophy is a “way of life” at academic conferences, the results vary. In some contexts, people respond with barely concealed condescension. Philosophy is about concepts, the pursuit of truth, and these days, the increasingly-uncertain pursuit of competitive advantage in a shrinking marketplace.

“How would you know you were living philosophically?”, someone asked at one such event. “Surely, even if we agree that a form of self-cultivation was what philosophy once was, this is no longer possible today,” others have rejoined.

The Stoic philosophy, some note, involved a highly systematic physics, many of whose propositions do not gel with our presently-best understandings of nature (notably, the idea of a providentially ordered cosmos that is in some sense a single living organism).

I had a strange Cynical impression of my own, when I recently discovered the phenomenal extent of the growth of “Modern Stoicism”, “How to Be a Stoic”, “Daily Stoic”, “Traditional Stoicism”, and associated blogs, email lists and Youtube channels since 2013.

The thousands of people who write, read and practice the Stoicism prescribed by these sites, take courses and attend annual events like Stoicon, I thought, are responding to the academic queries like Diogenes, the most famous Cynic, is said to have responded to a metaphysical argument that purported to show that movement was impossible.

Initiating the long and invaluable tradition of philosophical satire, the old dog got up from his armchair and walked around.

Why Stoicism?

But why Stoicism, and why now? I recently asked these and other questions to several of the leading figures associated with the new Stoic movement, and spent time investigating their sites and stories.

The core of the answer has to be the enduring pertinence of Stoic ethics, especially as it has come down to us through the Roman Stoics Seneca, Epictetus, Musonius Rufus and Marcus Aurelius.

The pertinence hinges upon a few very simple, powerfully intuitive observations and principles.

These begin with Epictetus‘ simple call to people to always distinguish between what is, and is not in our control. There is, at some basic level, no rational point in being unhappy about the things we can’t change. Learning to let go of these things, in order to focus on what we can affect—our own present impulses, thoughts, and actions—just has to be both philosophically astute, as well as a psychological boon.

Imagine that all of the mental energy people spend worrying about what others think, tweet, like or say (or don’t) about them, what may happen in the future (but may not), and what cannot be changed in the past, could be freed up to attend solely to the things we each can presently alter.

This thought will bring you close to what the Stoics promise, via their (Socratic) stress that peoples’ inner character (or “virtue”) is the most important good anyone can prize or pursue.

Bust of Marcus Aurelius, the second century CE
Stoic philosopher-Emperor in the Metropolitan Museum.

All of the other, external things—from reputation to fame to power to money to … anything subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—all these are for the Stoics “indifferent”.

That is, they are neither good nor bad in themselves, nor can their possession or loss (as we sometimes say) “make us” happy or unhappy. It is our judgements of things which confers on them this power over us. But those judgements can be challenged by argument, and reframed through practice and resolve.

Stoicism has recently been described, in today’s terms, as one of the best “mind hacks” ever devised.

The resulting, advertised ability of Stoic “sages” to be able to bear up “philosophically”, despite the loss of their cities, properties, friends or even loved ones has given the school the perennial reputation for being a joyless, “grin and bear it” affair.

The Stoics however don’t want or require people to lose everything in order to find inner peace. (This is more the Cynics’ prescription). Stoicism instead asks people to cultivate the inner resources to be able to bear up to prosperity and adversity alike with equanimity.

Hamlet’s friend Horatio, whose Stoic virtue makes
him not a pipe for fortune’s finger to sound what stop she pleases.

From the Serenity Prayer to Shakespeare to Roosevelt to modern authors like Walt Whitman or Tom Wolfe, Stoicism has remained one of the abiding threads out of which Western culture has been woven.

And while most of us will find many aspects of the Stoic physics and theology foreign, there seems little in this ethics which has or could ever age. This realisation led the founders of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to adapt Stoic principles and prescriptions into 20th century psychotherapy, before today’s 21st century revival under Stoicism’s own name.

It is just a good deal harder to be a Stoic in practice, than to Stoicise in theory. And this is where communities of debate and practice come into it.

Why now and how?

One old criticism of the Stoics, from the German philosopher Hegel, is that Stoicism is a philosophy for times of de-democratisation.

It emerged after classical Greece’s autonomous, democratic city-states had undergone terminal decline. The philosophy re-empowers people individually, in a world where everything else is at the disposal of powers, like the Hellenistic Kings and Roman Emperors, who can at any moment rob us of all our worldly possessions.

There are real historical problems with this idea. But perhaps it captures something about the attractions of Stoicism today. We are entering into a period in which the postwar liberal-democratic consensus is straining. Meanwhile, the security and surveillance apparati of modern corporations and nation-states increasingly call into question what privacy could mean in the internet age.

The internet itself is the more material cause underlying today’s proliferation of Stoic practical philosophy, outside of the walls of academe.

Zeno the founding Stoic’s statue in modern Larnaka
(ancient Citium/Kition) in Southern Cyprus.

What we might call this “fifth Stoa” or “Stoicism 5.0"—counting the early, middle and late ancient periods scholars divide, plus the early modern "neoStoicism” of figures like Justus Lipsius—had humble beginnings.

Nobody’s ship was sunk. But the people associated with these beginnings had no idea how quickly their progeny would grow.

According to Donald Robertson, author of The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy:

Patrick Ussher, a PhD student at Essex University used it with a group of students who were trying to live for a week following the advice of Galen, Marcus Aurelius’ physician. His professor in the classics department at Essex, Chris Gill, organized for a group of people who had written about these things, including myself, Tim LeBon, and Jules Evans to meet with them and Stoic Week was born. There’s a video of that workshop at Exeter in 2012. That’s exactly how our Modern Stoicism project was born.

This project now includes several Facebook groups (the largest of which has, as of this week, over 25, 000 members), the Stoicism Subreddit (over 54,000 subscribers), email lists within which fierce debates rage on points of theoretical detail: numerous Stoic blogs, some Stoic consultants, and hundreds of Youtube videos.

There is the site “Traditional Stoicism” which has broken away from the other “modern” groups on grounds of an insistence that living according to Stoic ethics requires a commitment to the ancient Stoic physics and theology.

There are the “Modern Stoicism” and “How to be a Stoic” email feeds, on which articles on Stoic figures, texts and subjects—and, in the latter case, a popular Stoic Advice column—are posted every other day.

Some groups recommend Eastern meditative practices of “mindfulness” alongside, or as the corollary, of Stoic practices. Others demur.

Then there is a site like “Daily Stoic” which sends daily Stoic meditation themes to subscribers’ email addresses: whether quotes from the great Hellenistic and Roman Stoics, or from works of literature and philosophy on Stoic themes.

A way of life, not just a theory

All of these online communities are united by the conviction that Stoicism was and remains, at its core, a way of life. Their founding father, in this regard, is the great French classicist and historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot.

In a series of works written after 1970, based upon an exacting apprenticeship in theology and philology, Hadot became convinced that the only way to make sense of what the ancient Stoics (and Epicureans and Pyrrhonians) wrote was if we suppose that they conceived philosophy as what the Stoics called “an art of living”.

Pierre Hadot, author of The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of
Marcus Aurelius, and other influential works.

Many of the texts, notably including the Roman Stoics’ at the heart of today’s Stoic revival, feature prescriptions for what Hadot called “spiritual exercises”. These include meditative exercises, wherein a student is for instance encouraged to re-envisage her situation from above, in order to re-contextualise (and bring a larger perspective to) the difficulties they face.

Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations involve a series of fragments wherein the emperor enjoins this and other exercises on himself: like the practice of remembering, with gratitude, all the people who have benefited him, and what he owes to each of them; or premeditating, every morning, how in the day ahead we will confront people who irritate or misconstrue us, and situations that do not “go our way”; or remembering that “the best revenge is not to become like the person who has wronged you”, whose thoughts and actions in any case are primarily their own concern.

Seneca tells us that each night, before sleep, he would make time to examine all of the previous days’ actions in the Stoic light of his philosophical principles.

The answer to how a person would know they are living like a Stoic is then pretty clear, to all but some professionals. Zeno is again on the move.

The Stoic student would be undertaking these and other exercises, every day, at allocated times, in ways recommended for instance in the “Live like a Stoic” week that has been running since 2012. As Robertson explained his own Stoic practice to the author recently:

I study Stoic literature pretty much every day …. [and] I try to live like a Stoic. I take a cold shower every morning; I fast every Sunday; I exercise based on Stoic principles in the mornings. I prepare for setbacks in the morning and review my day before going to sleep … I also use the View from Above if I’m ever feeling stressed. But Stoicism is my ethic, so in a sense I’m trying to apply it throughout the day to every situation.

Of course, not everyone who belongs to the 21st century, Stoic online communities will live out so completely the kind of philosophical regimen Robertson describes here.

But the fact that so many people now belong to these 21st century Stoic communities suggests that, whatever may happen to philosophy in its later modern academic iterations in coming decades, its ancient calling will remain vibrantly alive.

Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Book Notes: "The Iliad" by Homer

Michel Martin Drolling's "Wrath of Achilles" (1810). Source: Wikimedia.

The Iliad by Homer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This version was quite the tome and I suffered from RSI just from holding the book. I have embarked upon the Great Books series as set out by Hutchins and Adler at the University of Chicago and this great tale is number 1. This is no small task but it is essential. Time and again I have seen movies about Achilles and the fall of Troy but there is something to be said about the various translations and notes that direct the reader to a long history of debates, arguments, and disagreements over Homer (or whether it was Homers), and then the translations that incorporate the Latin amendments (such as Samuel Butler's), and then how the "folk tradition" has twisted and turned this nation-building epic to suit different times. The movies have it that Hector was simply out-classed, not that he ran three laps around the walls of Troy trying to escape Achilles, not that the gods intervened time and again, even helping to kill other soldiers and so on. I like the introduction's idea of Hector as a complete man, husband, father, prince, warrior; whereas Achilles is the unbalanced warrior, hell-bent on death and glory. I have now started on The Odyssey and I did not know that the Trojan horse was not of the first book, I had suspicions but I did not know that Ulysses was the Latin name, and so on. Even the unpacking of these issues helps with my reading of Plato and Aristotle. I felt I had arrived at a place where reading more of the classic scholars made no sense unless I had at least a working grasp of Homer. But the manly ideal that has been bastardised by Hollywood and others has set me thinking deeply. Honour didn't mean masculine aggression at all costs, or that any man could do anything, or that class could not hold one back and so on. In the translation (rather than bastardisation) of the original, an entirely different view of masculinity emerges. These people were all fallible, all helped or thwarted by fortune, the gods played a major role in the plot (religion is all but excluded from the Brad Pitt version of the story), and Paris, a snivelling coward, is not helped out by Hector. Hector hates him! So much to unlearn from reading one of the oldest "western" texts. I shirk at this title - much like the re-writing of Greek ideas about masculinity, all of a sudden the Eastern Europeans get a guernsey in the Great Race Race because they were so brilliant. But it really does set me at ease to now see the portrayals of the Greek ideal and be able to see it for what it was meant to be. This does not help me to feel more secure in the world, but it does help me to see the world differently, and, maybe, more accurately.

View all my reviews

Book Notes: "Rhetoric" by Aristotle

Raphael's "School of Athens" (c.1510). Source: Wikimedia.

Rhetoric by Aristotle

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Some of this book reads like a manual for living with what seem to be the simplest instructions imaginable. Wake up, lift the cover, put your feet on the floor, stand up, go to the bathroom, etc. Yet when one thinks about this being some of the earliest writings in recorded history, this instruction manual in how to be persuasive in speech and in writing states exactly what we teach our university students today. And therein lies the simplicity that belies its brilliance. This is my first cover-to-cover reading of Rhetoric. There are many references to Topics, Poetics, and Politics, and other works on rhetoric by other authors, but the reading of this work has inspired me to embark on a proper reading of the Great Books series, as set out by Hutchins and Adler at the University of Chicago, and I have begun at the beginning with Homer's Iliad. I recall a commentary on Darwin - George Bernard Shaw I think it was - that ran something like "once Darwin had proved, through systematic use of the evidence, that natural selection was a very real phenomenon, he did it over again with even more examples to the point of tedium". But Aristotle was the original. Simply reading this points me to the problem with all of my rejected papers - they are not systematic. I recall the guidance of my old professor: "When it is so simple it sounds too easy, then it is good". I also recall Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's [etc] "...has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away". Aristotle points to this and, much like Darwin, points to it again and again so as to remove all doubt. While reading Aristotle is much like my reading of J.S. Mill and Trotsky, as in it feels like I am reading my own knowledge in a book. Not because I am so knowledgeable, but because these authors permeated my education. Now, at least, I can see clearly where that education came from, and I am, strange as it may seem, excited about reading the Great Books I am yet to read.

View all my reviews

Pleasures and Palaces: Parlour Music comes to Old Gunning Courthouse

Old Gunning Courthouse, first opened 1879, now a community facility. Photo by Michael de Percy.

The Gunning Focus Group hosted a mid-winter afternoon of parlour music for an enthusiastic audience of about 40 people today in the Old Gunning Courthouse.

The acoustics of the old courtroom are quite good, and the Yamaha upright piano is in good condition and well-tuned. This was confirmed by the dexterous Crookwell maestro, Katrina Rivera, who is no stranger to Gunning. Ms Rivera delighted with Debussy's Clair de Lune, my personal favourite, among other classics from Mozart and Handel.

Ms Rivera also explained the instruments some of the pieces were originally written for, including the forte piano and the square piano. It really is true that you learn something every day!

Katrina Rivera and Susan West performing Swan Lake.
Photo by Michael de Percy

Today's highlights included several original arrangements by Ms Rivera and flautist (and self-styled "parlour" pianist) Susan West, with vocals performed by the talented soprano, Georgia Pike. 

While Dr West's renditions of Swan Lake and Princess Leia's Theme, accompanied by piano, were standouts, Dr West also accompanied Ms Pike's wonderful vocal work.

Soprano Georgia Pike
leading the audience in song.
Photo by Michael de Percy.

Gunning local and Gunning Focus Group host, Mike Coley, said there were three "firsts" at today's event. 

This was the first time that the heater didn't work (but we were saved by our talented vocalist, so despite the cold weather, the courtroom was quite comfortable), it was the first time a piano duet (by Ms Rivera and Dr West) had been performed for the group, and it was also the first time that audience participation was part of the entertainment.

Concert Details

Ms Pike led the audience in a number of songs (the lyrics conveniently provided by our vocalist), including Home Sweet Home (Payne & Bishop); Loch Lomond (Traditional); and If You Were the Only Girl in the World (Grey & Ayer). The participation was welcomed by the enthusiastic audience, many of whom were obviously well-versed in the lyrics!

The Gunning Focus Group have more in store for us this July with a piano and cello concert. 

Davis Pereira, cello, and Ed Neeman, piano, will present a concert of works by Rachmaninov and Prokofiev in the Courtroom, Old Gunning Courthouse, at 2.30pm on Sunday, 30 July. Tickets $30, concessions and Focus Group members $25. Presented by Gunning Focus Group.

Enquiries and bookings (02) 4845 1566, 0417 663 045 or michael.coley@bigpond.com. Please note the later start time due to Gunning markets.

Why not make a day of it and visit the Gunning Lions Club Markets beforehand?