Rilke: Coming to Terms with a Death that Doesn't Fit and other notebook entries...

Lou Andreas-Salomé with (from left) her husband Friedrich Karl Andreas, the architect August Endell and Rainer Maria Rilke in a summer house near Munich, 1897. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This work is often regarded as the first 'modernist' novel. I find it hard to place. As far as genre is concerned, it is not quite Finnegan's Wake, that Rilke was a poet does not make this like a Bukowski novel, nor is it a work of non-fiction in the vein of Rabindranath Tagore. I enjoyed the work, but usually I write about my reading as soon as I am finished. I finished this work late last night and I am still trying to work out what happened! The Notebooks read just like notebooks. But in the first half or so, one reads about a child born into privilege at a time when the privileged classes are losing their grip. One reads about infatuation, love, wonder, ghosts. Then in the second half, it becomes something of an historical rant. Not as one might find in a novel where historical persons and events have been used as raw material for fiction, but where you are reading a fiction that is discussing historical events. This version includes end notes to the historical figures and events and highlights parts of the work that originated from Rilke's personal experiences. For example, Rilke witnessed a man with St Vitus' dance (Sydenham's chorea) who is captured in the notebooks; and his own experiences as a child are recreated in the person of young Brigge. Such historical renderings were wonderful. I must admit to not having known anything of Rilke. But like all new things, now I see him everywhere - he influenced James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and many others. Rilke seems obsessed with death, but he does it so well (pp. 5-6):

[The death of a poor person] is of course a banal one, with neither pomp nor circumstance. They are happy to find one that more or less fits. They don't mind if it's a little too large, because they can always grow into it. But it's bothersome if the front won't do up or it's tight at the throat.

I enjoyed reading this work without an introduction. If I could compare the work to anyone, it would be closest to Kafka, but without the sense of plot or chronology. And without an overblown introduction, it leaves the reader to "come to terms" with the author, as Mortimer Adler would say. But I doubt that many would find it easy to come to terms with Rilke. This might best be done with his poetry.

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On the Standardisation Aesthetic in Education: All the Same "Just Because"

US Military parade at the Imperial Palace Plaza, 1948. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

Standardisation is an important means to an end - typically efficiency. Shipping containers and pallets are interesting examples. A world without these would be a very different world. Standard electrical fittings, too, are convenient - you notice this most when you travel overseas and you do not have a country-specific adaptor. 

But what about when standardisation is not a means to an end, but an end in itself? This I call the standardisation aesthetic.

I noticed this first in the military. The regimental sergeant major walked into a classroom and ordered the desks to be lined up precisely, and make it "all regimental-like". Later, I found myself being annoyed at the way the cheese was cut. In its extreme, it becomes obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can be unhealthy.

So when I find education managers wanting to make everything "nice and regimental-like", I question: What are they trying to achieve? Efficiency? Hardly. While management is busy checking up on everyone else, some important system is typically offline. Often, it is simply this: the standardisation aesthetic. I find this permeates so many things in higher education.

In a nation that routinely claims universal ideas as part of its "culture" or "way of life", the standardisation aesthetic is surely a cultural artefact that manifests itself regularly, but is rarely observed. And I don't mean "artefact" in the sense of a human-made tool or object, but in the scientific sense of "something observed in a scientific investigation or experiment that is not naturally present but occurs as a result of the preparative or investigative procedure".

Having worked for a few years in my youth in hydraulic spare parts and industrial bearing sales, I heard the term "standard" frequently. A typical customer engagement would go like this:

Customer: "I need an o-ring/oil seal/tapered roller bearing for a thing".
Me: "What size/type/brand/thing is it?"
Customer: "Oh, it's standard".
Me: "Yeah, right. There's no such thing".

Anyone who has worked in spare parts will know this story. It happens every day, and I have even stopped myself from saying it (it is possible, for example, to have Ford bearings in a Holden trailer hub - and it's "standard").

So we have two issues here. First, standardisation can achieve efficiency. Granted. But second, standardisation becomes an expectation to make things more convenient. But what if "it" isn't standard, and therefore it isn't convenient?

I ask this question because when designing a customer experience, the more convenient, the better. Consumers can mind-numbingly buy the same thing without thinking while retailers pocket the profit. Except in grocery stores. The trick in grocery stores is to routinely rearrange the store. This disrupts habits and forces shoppers to "look" for their preferred or habitual purchases. 

Of course, it typically leads to shoppers buying things they didn't need or want. There is a reason that every convenience store has the bread and the milk at the back of the store, you know.

But what about the people who are meant to be future leaders? Should we provide a consistent customer experience for students? I say no.

The world is not standard. Sure, parts of it are or can be, but this works best when there is an end in sight - an objective. Standardise shipping containers and pallets, and we have efficient physical distribution systems. Standardise the customer experience, and we have an efficient market or distribution system for goods and services. 

But standardise nature, and one day the species is wiped out because we removed the opportunities for critical variations in the evolutionary gene pool to occur. Natural selection ceases to function. Do the same with our markets, and organisations will cease to innovate and eventually die. Just like the Soviet Union. Or Kodak.

What, then, of our students? Elementary knowledge like times tables? Find the best approach and standardise it. Leadership? Find the best approach and standardise it. Oh, wait. That won't work. Why? Because we are all unique individuals and what works for one won't necessarily work for another. 

We have entered the realm of the social sciences and therefore we cannot reduce everything to standardised units. Even if we could, those sneaky humans might change their behaviour, just to annoy our cunning plan.

There are two problems with standardised education. First, the world isn't standard, so creating a falsely standardised learning environment is counter-productive. It may produce efficient consumers, but it won't produce effective leaders. 

Second, creating a standardised learning environment removes opportunities for students to grapple with diverse and nuanced situations. I always tell my students that an undergraduate degree is proof that they can navigate their way through bureaucracy. Watch your grandmother try to grapple with a Centrelink form and you will see what I mean. 

So standardisation as an aesthetic is a cultural artefact - we only notice it when we strip away the rhetoric of good governance. As educators, we need to ask ourselves, what is the purpose of standardisation? Will it improve our efficiency? Making course information or learning materials readily available is a good example. Standardise away.

But when standardisation becomes an end in itself, we need to question the wisdom of such an approach and ask, why?

Management won't like it, but we risk doing our students a disservice if we let the aesthetic run its course. We need to see it for what it is, and, funnily enough, only someone with a bit of social science training could see standardisation as an artefact. The variations are important opportunities for developing new skills, new knowledge, and improving living standards.

If we standardise everything, we will have a beautiful education system, all regimental-like. Why? Well, just because. And that doesn't sound very educated to me.

Schopenhauer on Religion: Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet

Krishna teaching Arjuna, from Bhagavata Gita.
House decoration in Bishnupur, West Bengal, India. By Arnab Dutta (2011) CC BY-SA 3.0

The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion by Arthur Schopenhauer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have second-hand knowledge of Schopenhauer's "the will to live is consecrated in the act of procreation" thesis, and while it makes a brief appearance, much of this collection is focused on religion. The "On Various Subjects" section reads a little like La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, and makes some interesting assertions about genius (it is OK to make mistakes, just your masterpiece ought to be inimitable); on the farcical nature of higher education (perception must precede concept, not the other way around); an early statement concerning animal rights (p. 77); and that great works have to wait until enough idiots agree that it is great - such insight is possessed by the majority in the same way that a "castrate possesses of the power to beget children". Now to religion. Some of my favourites:

All religion is antagonistic towards culture; 

The absurdities of dogma... arise from the need to link together two heterogeneous doctrines as those of the Old and the New Testaments; 

Hatred and contempt are decidedly antagonistic to one another and mutually exclusive (p. 52);

The more prudent rulers enter into an alliance with [priests]; and

Faith and knowledge are totally different.

The latter explains the dialogue On Religion, which, although I understand Schopenhauer was atheistic, appeared on the surface to be bombastic, but might otherwise resonate with court judges who have been confronted with decisions concerning the existence of God, and have deferred on the grounds that, in effect, "faith and knowledge" are different. Nevertheless, there is in this work the attitude (of The Enlightenment) that rational individuals cannot possibly believe in God. I have heard this sentiment expressed by senior academics, in addition to the buffoons who drool over the Facebook echo-chamber "I F***ing Love Science" which confirms empirically that God does not exist because it has 25 million "likes" (see quote above about "castrates"). That said, there is little to surprise the modern reader, but Schopenhauer was one of the few Western students of India, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and his insights demonstrate that the glory days Conservatives dream about did not really exist in the nineteenth century, the counterfactuals were simply hidden from majority view. But to disclose the real gem in this work, I found another piece to the riddle of Benjamin Franklin. One of his "virtues" is "moderation". This is not a riddle in itself, but when "temperance" is also one of the virtues, what is so special about moderation that it should stand alone? Schopenhauer explains in the essay On Ethics by setting out some of the differences between Eastern and Western virtues and vices. For Schopenhauer, "virtues are qualities of will", which means that cowardice cannot be a vice if we have the "will to live"! The Platonic virtues closely align with Franklin's,one of which Cicero translated as temperantia, which is"in English moderation". Schopenhauer states:

[Moderation] is a very vague and ambiguous expression under which many different things can be subsumed, such as prudence, sobriety, keeping one's head.

Prudence. Cautious. To Franklin, "avoiding extremes". "Sobriety", therefore, belongs with "temperance". But "prudence" and "keeping one's head", then, belong to moderation. Whether "keeping one's head" is the same thing as to "forbear resenting injuries so much as one is able" remains to be seen, but I daresay Schopenhauer and Franklin were conversant in the literature on virtues, and eventually I will solve the riddle. But what of Schopenhauer? Religion is something we believe because we are indoctrinated as children, but as humanity "grows up", religion must inevitably die because it doesn't make sense (irrational). Yet the final paragraph tells the story of adolescents throwing out the baby with the bathwater - Aesop's fables are too childish because everybody knows foxes, wolves, and ravens can't talk! Thus, Schopenhauer ends with a real noodle-baker (about the boy who was too grown up to read Aesop):

Who cannot see in this hopeful lad the future enlightened Rationalist?

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Weather Update: Keswick Station Lessons Learnt & Improvements

Increasing the height of the temperature gauge to prevent interference from the rooftop

Last evening, my weather station recorded the temperature at a peak of 37.1° C at 6:28pm. There was no way it was that hot. I even climbed onto the roof of the dunny to check the temperature. It was not that hot.

I checked the documentation for the station, and mine was only 1' off the roof - the recommended height is 5' - this explains why the temperature yesterday had peaked at around 34.4° C at 4pm -  which I suspect was about right - only to drop and then suddenly increase as the sun dropped in the sky. I suspect the angle of the sunlight and the reflection off the roof at this time of day was the culprit.

As soon as Gunning Ag & Water Solutions opened this morning, I obtained a solid poly stake and some hose clamps and set to work. Of course, I had originally set up the station before I had put the wire over the top of the chook pen. (I knew this would happen, but at the time I shrugged it off.) But thankfully my "Mission Impossible" ladder allowed me to get around the obstacle I had created for myself.

I did not turn off the station before moving it, and this caused another issue. Apparently, the rain gauge functions with a drop-flap (a bit like the old aircraft toilets). This meant that at 9:30am, I recorded 5.7mm of "rain" due to the motion of the station while I added the stake. As you can see from the picture above, there was no actual rain this morning!

The temperature as I write is 34.4° C. The nearest Weather Underground station is at Jerrawa (just up the road), and I am within 1° C of the reading there. It is a useful benchmark, as the Jerrawa Station uses a more expensive Vantage Pro2 weather station. This was certainly useful yesterday when I was recording 37° C while everywhere else was recording around 30° C.

I believe the weather station is now setup with the recommended specifications, and, within the capability of my system, the temperature information is accurate.

The issues now are: (1) Is the radiation guard sufficient to keep direct sunlight off the sensor? and (2) Will the poly stake hold when the westerly blast-furnace winds begin again? Time will tell.

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics Begins Here

Chairman Mao is the red sun in our hearts, September 1968

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung by Mao Zedong

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This copy I purchased from the markets on Antique Road, Hong Kong, some time ago. I decided on a cover to cover reading. I soon found that the quality of my copy was not the best, and I had to look up the punchline of the Chinese myth "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains". As it turns out, Mao used the myth in relation to the two mountains - imperialism and feudalism - that could be chipped away by the generations. My knowledge of China's modern history is limited, and my reading on Mao's influence has been limited to Mao's On Guerrilla Warfare, Sun Shuyun's The Long March, and the "beautiful yet sinister" Chinese Propaganda Posters (published by Taschen in 2015 - I purchased my copy at the Hong Kong Museum of Modern Art bookstore, a favourite haunt). My favourite quote (p. 337):

...in the year 2001, or the beginning of the 21st century, China... will have become a powerful socialist industrial country.

I learnt a bit more about Norman Bethune, the Canadian physician who worked with Mao after serving as a doctor during the Spanish Civil War, and discovered interesting viewpoints on "democratic centralism". Mao discusses political theory, education policy, "contradictions" and ways to overcome these, such as that that exists between classes, officers and men, comrades, and in terms of patriotism versus internationalism. Mao's quotes are all after The Long March (the Red Army's retreat in 1934 that left only 1/5 of the Army remaining, but ultimately led to the Red Army's victory and was to become a major pillar of Communist Party propaganda). Following on from The Long March, this collection of quotations is an intense lesson in the modern history of China. Many of the quotes are drawn from the "Selected Works". It is difficult to buy English translations of the less popular works by Mao, and I would like to read more of this in future, as, for all his other not insignificant digressions, he was certainly an important scholar, poet, and political theorist. Like anything that is not of "us", Mao's works have largely been ignored, yet he, and later, Deng Xiaoping, were the driving forces behind the Chinese powerhouse that has emerged in my own lifetime. "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" is something that we should all be studying at this point in history, and this "little red book" is a good place to start.

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On Giving Yourself a Break: or, You are a man, not God!

Entrega de las llaves a San Pedro (The Delivery of the Keys to Saint Peter).
Fresco, Sistine Chapel, by Pietro Perugino, c. 1481. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Benjamin Franklin's Virtues Journal lists "humility" as the thirteenth virtue, with the catchphrase "Imitate Jesus and Socrates" as guidance for practising humility. But what does this mean? It is easy to shrug this off with assumptions about the "What would Jesus do?" heuristic, but to specify what Franklin meant by imitating Jesus or Socrates led me to this classic text of Christian devotion from the early fifteenth century. Franklin was, at least towards the end of his life, a monotheist, and he doubted the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. I read Kempis' work in a similar spirit. Kempis advises us to

...imitate His life and habits, if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all blindness of heart.

"Book Two: The Interior Life" was especially enlightening, in that it echoes Epictetus. Epictetus would have us "indifferent" to externals, and while his assumptions about God or "the gods" echoes Heraclitus, Kempis is more to the point:

If you attend to God and yourself, you will little be disturbed by what you see about you.

Instances of Stoic philosophy are scattered through Book Two, less so in Book Four which looks at the taking of Holy Communion. The ongoing dialogue between "The Voice of Christ" and "The Disciple" clearly links Jesus with God (as in the Trinity), and there is clearly a Christian focus. Of course, this is a translation, and while I looked at another translation online, the differences were mostly in readability, as opposed to differences of opinion (as far as I can see). There are frequent references to what is "manly": love, self-conquest, not complaining. But also, an appreciation for the ups and downs of life. God grants His grace one moment, then withdraws it another. This is a normal thing. We should be grateful for when we experience God's grace, and patient when God withdraws His grace. Further, we should be aware that nature is about the self (as in survival), whereas grace is about the community (the social). So, "nature" would have us proud, whereas grace would have us humble. Yet, I did not have this sense of simply buckling oneself to everyone else's will - it was about self-conquest in the spiritual realm, rather than self-flagellation. I could relate this to Epictetus's and Seneca's ideas about managing our impressions - being "indifferent" to them - and James Allen's As A Man Thinketh amplifies Kempis' themes (indeed, Allen now reads as a diary-version of Kempis' Book Two). Most importantly, Kempis reminds us that "all is not lost" as we can never get it right:

You are a man, not God. You are flesh, not an angel.

I found this work mesmerising, enlightening, beautiful. Have I found the answer to Benjamin Franklin's riddle? Well, not quite. Franklin has a number of other riddles that will require a reading of Aristotle's Ethics, and there is more to be gleaned from St. Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle. Yet I can feel that I am nearing an understanding. Of course, Mortimer Adler would say that if I cannot explain it, then I do not understand. Thankfully, Kempis tells me that I am a man, not God, so I can give myself a break. But I am glad that I took Alder's advice and I have started making notes in the margins of my books (in pencil only!), for I shall be returning to this book again and again and it will sit with my copy of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography for ready reference.

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Latest Gunning Weather: Keswick IGUNNING4 Weather Station Now Live!

My Weather Station IGUNNING4 at Keswick, Gunning, atop the brick dunny (built in 1926 by the Caldwell Brothers)

My latest gadget is a wireless weather station. I have installed it atop the old brick dunny in the backyard (which now functions as part of the chook pen).

It may be an old man thing to be interested in the weather, but there is something that happens as one ages: the phases of the moon, the speed of the wind, the rainfall, all these things seem to matter more as one ages.

I don't think I ever consciously thought about the weather until I was in my 40s. Now I check the weather regularly to decide on how to dress and whether or not to take an umbrella. 

The setup for my weather station is simple but practical. It is a Digitech IC0348 Touch Screen Wireless Weather Station with USB PC Connection from Instrument Choice. I used the recommended software "Easyweather" and joined Weather Underground to share my weather station's information.

The latest weather information for Gunning is now available from my weather station via Weather Underground.

The Art of Reading: Great Books and the Liberal Ideal

Dr Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001)

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mortimer Adler was Editor-in-Chief of the Great Books series, and a proponent of a liberal education in the Western tradition. This work is in the same vein, but it is what Adler refers to as a "practical" book. In the introduction he notes the fun that was made of his book title, with a spoof How to Read Two Books written shortly after by Erasmus G. Addlepate. As I started reading the book, I felt like I was being taught by an "old school" teacher who had to go through the basics before getting to the point some time later in life. But therein lies the charm of the work - by the end, I felt I had been reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty - all the ideas were lining up, my liberal education had been delivered correctly, and I understood why I do what I do. What struck me most is that the four stages of reading, from elementary to syntopical, lead one to being able to organise a literature review. If ever there was a book that teaches how to systematically, and practicably, go about conducting a literature review, this is it. The process seems almost absurd when spelt out - much like Aristotle's Poetics - it reads like:

1. Select two eggs.

2. Suck.

But that would be so wrong! There is so much here, I am pleased it was my first read for the year, and I intend to add some of the techniques to my daily journalling practice (or maybe even keep a separate book journal). The two appendices are helpful. The first provides an updated list of the Great Books of the Western World (most of which are available online free these days). The second provides a series of tests on each of the levels of reading. This was designed to be "exemplary" but it was also a bit of fun, with some interesting text on Mill, Newton, Dante, et al. For anyone interested in classic works, this book is a useful guide to the art of reading, but also desktop research. One interesting change to my reading habits has resulted. Adler states that part of the fun of owning a book is that you can write in the margins. For decades I have cringed at the thought of doing this - my books are all catalogued and covered - but in Adler's book, I took out my sharpened pencil and begin to make margin notes. I suppose it is fine if I do this in pencil. And it will certainly make it easier to relocate quotes, instead of using my typically ineffective method of remembering page numbers for important quotes. I am a devotee to the Great Books cause. I was pleased to note that Adler writes that he has limited knowledge of the great books of the eastern world, and this was his main reason for not introducing "Eastern" works (a little Orientalism goes a long way), but given the work was written in 1940 and then revised in the 1970s, it was ahead of its time. There is something about the liberal democratic ideal and reading that Adler points to time and again, and while my own ideals have been systematically destroyed through practice, Adler paints an honourable picture of liberalism as it is rarely practised these days. This is not an easy book, and for some it might be off-putting, but for me, I learnt more in this volume than I have in the last five years.

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