Finite and Infinite Goods

This book, an incredible work of philosophy/theology by Robert Merrihew Adams, has been the core of my educational reading for the last month. I'm writing a philosophy essay on the christian concept of love and how it links to the meta-ethics of motivation in a variety of theories of moral obligation (yeh it's a genuinely fun topic), and this has been my bulk inspiration book. I've been struggling to get it finished over the last couple of weeks because it's christmas-season and I've moved home, hence my reading of several less strenuous materials (see every other post this December), but have been thoroughly enjoyed it with interest nonetheless. I don't say this about many academic sources, but it's awesome.
   Adams has attempted to construct a framework for ethics centred around the Platonic concept of a transcendent Good and our relation to it. Strongly compatible with theism, especially christian belief systems, Adams takes this Good to be God. As the transcendent Good, all "good" things in the world can therefore be said to in some way resemble God in their intrinsic properties (which he calls "excellences") and are therefore appealing to a rational well-oriented human mind, because the universe was made by God in his nature as Good and so goodness is a naturally-diffuse characteristic of recognisable creation; that aspect specifically which lends value and rightness to it by affirming its unity and coherence. All excellences, especially morality, are good in that they are God-like and are to be encouraged, enjoyed, exercised, treasured. Evil then is not an equatable opposite power, simply an absence of or opposition to the Good.
   I am far too unskilled a philosophy-abstractioner to do justice in summarising Adams' book properly here, particularly because I myself so deeply enjoyed and agreed with it. I've ended up with several thousand pages of wrist-crampingly handwritten notes on it which at some point, bugger everything as a I now realise, I will have to transcribe onto a computer are they to have any use for my essay. However I hope the rough overview I've just given has made it sound interesting. If it hasn't, here's a very brief description of the topic of each chapter:

1. God as the Good - why is the metaphysical/theological person of a God the best fit for his central concept of transcendent Good?
2. the Transcendence of the Good - what are the implications of this Good's being better and definitive of other goods?
3. Well-being and Excellence - how are we to judge good outcomes in human lives?
4. the Sacred and the Bad - what significance does the Good lend to this that do (or don't) resemble it, and what does this imply for right attitudes towards them?
5. Eros - how does God (and do we) love things for their own sake?
6. Grace - how does God (and do we) love things for the Good's sake?
7. Devotion - how do/should we organise our motivational structures in making decisions involving goodness?
8. Idolatry - what happens what the Good is not the centre of the motivational structures discussed in the previous chapter?
9. Symbolic Value - is there a place in relating to the Good for acts that proclaim but do not effectively serve it?
10. Obligation - given systematic social use of guilt as a structure for obligating certain behaviours, how does this apply here?
11. Divine Commands - how do social-style obligations work when it is the Good (i.e. God) themselves that obligates certain behaviours?
12. Abraham's Dilemma - are the obliged commands of the Good always good?
13. Vocation - are there particular decisions or behaviours specific to individuals that we can take to be obligatory goods but not universals?
14. Politics and the Good - what are the implications of everything discussed so far for how we approach political systems and concepts?
15. Revelation of the Good - how do we even find out what goodness is in the first place, or relate it to a Good?
16. Moral Faith - is a certain trusting leap required to accept any system of morality, including this one?

   What struck me hard from the book is how coherent his system of ideas is, though drawing so deeply on academic philosophy and on sets of ideas completely alien to it. Adams has refashioned the divine command theory of moral obligation (hardly a popular theory anyway) in a way that is bold, efficient, edifying, and makes a lot of sense; it doesn't depend upon assuming but fits perfectly well with vast chunks of theist thinking, mostly christian theology, especially given the primacy of love as an importance in our relation to the Good.
   Robert Merrihew Adams, to me, has gone from being being a name on the module's recommended reading list (when I first heard of him) to being a world-famous eminent philosopher on theological ethics and metaphysics (when I googled him later) to being a supremely agreeable and intelligent man with whom I find immense common ground and cannot commend for his excellences enough (when I finished his book). This book meshed with and enhanced my own thinking really well: so much of what I have always vaguely felt but never articulated philosophically about ethics he outlines with casual accuracy; so much of what I have given much intense thought to about theology, politics, metaphysics and faith he adroitly encompasses in a cogent intelligible system that helps justify and unify my own thinking about these things.
   Anyone who is interested in ethics, anyone who is a thinking christian, and especially anyone who is both, I wholeheartedly exhort you to put this, my last book of 2014, on your reading lists for next year.

Beano annual 2015

This book is the annual compendium of special comics from that archaic weekly sort-of-funny children's comic and relic of when your parents were kids, the Beano. I've been at the family home over the week surrounding Christmas, and I found myself stuck in inactivity.* My brothers are elsewhere so games, conversations, or just annoying them with my presence aren't doable; the books I brought with me have tired me somewhat in their length and seriousness; the three inches of snow outside froze over in the night and I'm too cowardly of an Englishman to go for a slippery walk in it; the internet is a bottomless hole of boredom-inducing-boredom-prevention material; TV is obsolete and I don't know entirely how the new remote control works. I found this annual on the coffee table and decided to shoot my nostalgia in the face by reading it.

   The Beano is a weekly children's comic published in the UK since 1938, familiar to any English people who were children during the second half of the 20th century (or in the early noughties, if your parents swamp you as they did me and my siblings with hundreds of back-issues to keep you so occupied in reading them that you neglect to notice and thus ask for such expensive new-fangled contraptions as Playstations or SNES consoles). It features a host of characters that I will not be able to fully list at their present population (some of them have died because of cutbacks or retiring cartoonists, others have been absorbed from complementary "rival" comic the Dandy, others have been newly created to try desperately to find something that will turn the comic into a product that doesn't routinely hemorrhage its printers through children these days simply having far too many better things to do). To give some disappointedly-cynical overviews of examples of characters (most of whom have been around for decades) from the heyday of Beanodom back when I was aged 3-9 and a devoted a reader as there ever was, characters included:

• Dennis the Menace, a boy with spiky black hair who wears a red-and-black striped jumper and deliberately irritates people. Vocations range from systematic bullying of wimpy kids, subversion of all generic authorities,** and causing mess and upset. He has a dog called Gnasher who helps with these endeavours, which also for some reason looks almost identical to his hair given eyes, legs and teeth.
• Minnie the Minx, literally just the girl version of the above but ginger and wearing a beret with an inexplicable pompom.
• Roger the Dodger, a classic anti-authority wise-guy who uses far-fetched pranks and tricks to avoid doing work, get out of trouble, avoid normal healthy social interactions, and so on.
• Ivy the Terrible, a toddler who pretty much just shouts and causes mess and upsets her dad lots.
• The Bash Street Kids; the incorrigible class 2B at an ineptly-run school. One of the favourite classics, probably because it's the only one that was funny more than 40% of the time. It was always my favourite as well, so I'll do it the justice of listing the characters - of whom there are about as many as there are in all the other Beano comics combined. Comprising them are:
• Teacher (the teacher, duh). Like Dennis' dad he also has a Hitler moustache; stoically resigned to a life of misery, he very rarely manages to teach anything.
• Danny, the gang's supposed leader; he proclaims naughtiness more than any of the others and managed to be the favourite of none of the readers. The comic-runners should have picked up on this and had more cartoons about people being funny instead of people just throwing tomatoes at policemen.
• Sidney, generic boisterous child.
• Toots, token female, who is Sidney's twin.
• Smiffy, a boy whose borderline-severe learning difficulties are accommodated for laughingly by his inclusive classmates. Or maybe he is all there and, for want of better-defined personality and friendship, has taken to saying and doing silly things all the time so as to retain a niche as the beloved social joke-butt.
• Wilfrid, a very short kid whose entire gimmick is that he is shaped like R2D2. Turtleneck extends halfway up his face. Says very little but seems well-meaning.
• 'Erbert, shortsighted boy who walks into things when people are looking at him but the rest of the time is perfectly able to join in the mayhem-causing.
• Plug, who always gave me the impression that he was one of the smartest in the group, but will never fully find acceptance because his whole being is centred around his Shrek-like ugliness.
• Spotty. Has a gimmick that his name makes rather predictable. Bald. Also has a very long tie for some reason.
• Fatty. Guess.
• Head (the headteacher); looks identical to Teacher but fat and in a suit. Eats biscuits. Avoids responsibility. My personal favourite, possibly tied with Spotty.
• Janitor (guess what his job is); looks identical to Head but in scruffy clothes. Gets annoyed when the kids make mess, which is like, every week.
• Winston, janitor's long-suffering cat. Can handle a broom. Possibly enslaved.
• Olive, the cook, all of whose concoctions are burblingly hideous.
• Cuthbert, the one good kid in class 2B, who looks like a miniature version of teacher and gets lots of stuff thrown at him for being sensible.
• Billy Whizz, a kid who can run very fast. All his comic strips are basically just not-even-funny explorations of what it would be like to be a really fast kid in a variety of mildly inconvenient situations.
• Calamity James, an unfortunate soul to whom everything bad that would likely be socially ruinous and/or actually fatal happens. Used to have a really visually-witty cartoonist, but in this book there's a new one, very closely imitating the style of the character's inventor with none of the panache.
• Bananaman, a boy called Eric who is really dumb and turns into a superhero whenever he eats a banana. This superhero is great at saving the day but is still really dumb. Imported from the Dandy after it collapsed from shifting demand.
• The Three Bears, literally just a family of three bears who, instead of hunting normally, devote endless outrageous plots to stealing food from the supermarket of a blunderbuss-toting rightly-annoyed man called Hank.
• Lord Snooty, basically Billy Whizz but he's rich instead of fast.
• The Numskulls, five tiny things that live inside a guy called Edd and respectively control his brain, eyes, nose, ears and mouth. Things happen to Edd because of them which are apparently amusing.
• Little Plum, a probably-racist portrayal of a Native American kid whose main task in life is to follow the orders of Big Chief regarding something to be done to buffalo.
• Crazy for Daisy, a girl called Daisy who has to frequently resort to pugilism in repelling the advances of a devoted stalker called Ernest. He is ignorant of being repeatedly spurned in his efforts to woo her.
• Ball Boy, the captain of Beanotown's (yes all the characters live in the same fictional town, calm right down) incompetent football team.

   There are many others who have come and gone over the years, but these are the core bunch that I recall. It definitely used to be funnier; this isn't just a nostalgic projection of my endless childhood afternoons reading these cartoons onto the disappointment that this annual was, nor is it that my age has tripled since my peak enjoyment of them and a more mature sensibility cannot as much find pleasure in them. No. They've actually got worse, and it's no fault of the publishers, whose commitment to still making a product that almost nobody wants I find kind of inspiring. Kids these days just aren't bothered about a cartoon boy throwing flour at his neighbour - why would they be if the alternative source of entertainment for them is throwing grenades at digital soldiers controlled by their friends? I feel like such an old person. Dammit.

* Yes, it's fair to say that December has thrown an odd spanner into the spokes of my reading habits: rather than plodding through a half-dozen pretentious novels and a half-dozen even-more-pretentious non-fiction books at a time and finishing them almost by accident, this month I have read a fair few random easy-go lazy-books. Cat poetry, regional trivia, weird cartoons, this; it's that time of year. Allow it.

** His dad used to have a Hitler-style moustache back in the 1990's. New artist now though. Thought you should know.

The Chickens Are Restless

This book, one of the many collections of The Far Side cartoons that lay so ubiquitous around my family's home that they are outnumbered on the bookshelves there only by John Grisham novels, Beano annuals and books on childcare, is, like all other collections of Gary Larson's superb comic, amusing and bizarre.

   I've moved back into the Stovell family home for the week surrounding Christmas, which is very generous of my parents (even though they did convert my bedroom into some sort of waiting lounge in my absence), and has the added benefits of free food and warmth, pushing my negligible budget that extra bit further until student loans come back in. I jest, material security is but an extra gratefulness; I love my family. Even the new dog, though she may never live up to the standards set by the brilliantly useless mongrel preceding her.

   Anyway, I hadn't unpacked yet and everyone was busy, so the first hour or so after getting home and making a brew I spent perusing this collection of comic strips. This blog is for any book I read, after all, not just the intellectual or deliberately interesting ones that I ostentatiously purchase and progress through.

   For those of you who don't know The Far Side, it's hilarious. A single-panel newpaper comic that ran from 1980 to 1995, it never fails to be weird. Comics are hard to discuss without dumping loads of links to examples them; the pictures and words are inseparable in most of the jokes, so I'll try to explain what characterises them. Mad existential retorts and logical fallacies, anthropomorphism and civilisation run amok, childishness and maturity blended together in the pits of half-recognisable awkwardness, the familiar and common turned inside-out and upside-down and still comprehensible enough to provoke a chuckle - these are the styles Gary Larson uses in his distinctive style of surreal comedy. The content of each strip is thoroughly unpredictable, even within this short collection of (still very random) ones, and there are no recurring characters, though regularly featured are overweight suburban humans, insects, nerds, monkeys, men trapped on desert islands, farmers, aliens, fish, dogs, scientists (including mad ones), exotic wildlife, amoebas, hunters, farm animals (yep, including chickens), and a plethora of others that I cannot possibly hope to list. Each strip is as unexpected and yet as similar as every other; the main thing you can rely upon The Far Side to do upon reading is a brief moment of uncomprehension followed by a strange lateral click when you notice a particular choice of word or frame of situation or detail of image that propels the whole comic into something so utterly odd (and occasionally genuinely witty) that you cannot help but laugh. This of course goes for the comic as a whole, and so if surreal humour does tickle your fancy and you weren't already aware of this comic, simply googling it will yield thousands of strips online, and collections of them such as this one are almost always to be found in the discount cheap section of comedy shelves in second-hand shops.

   Anyway, it's mid-afternoon on Christmas Eve and here I am talking to a handful of future strangers on the internet about a weird comic I've just read. I'm going to go get a refill of tea and see if my brothers want a Mariokart tournament. Merry tomorrow, dear whoever.

I Could Pee on This

This book, a collection of poetry "by cats" by humour-journalist Francesco Marciuliano, is not one to which I will devote much discussion. Much like the previous post's book, this was bought because of Secret Santa, albeit here I bought it expecting to be able to bestow it upon a friend who has an almost unhealthy predisposition toward all things cat-related (I have three of these, and planned to give the book to whomever I saw first). Sadly, all three of such felinist acquaintances of mine left Sheffield before I saw them while I had the book with me, and so I was left with a book of cat poetry. It's quite short, so literally in the time since I wrote the last post I've just been for a leisurely toilet sitting and read it then. Probably won't give it to any of them now - unless I can be certain that they do not also read this blog from time to time. Nobody wants a book that has accompanied a friend's turd.
   Despite my fairly ambivalent attitude toward cats, I seem to have read lots of books attempting to enter their psyche this year (one through Japanese literature and one through artsy satire). Perhaps I am gaining a subconscious affinity for them by spending too much procrastinatory time in the corners of the internet devoted to gifs of their failings. I probably am, but who isn't these days?
   Anyway, sorry, the book. It's alright.
   If you find human-verbal constructed interpretations of the mindsets and internal monologues of cats amusing, you'll enjoy this, but only about as much as the average stint of scrolling through funny online cat material anyway. The book is pretty much redundant in that respect, except as a present for someone who you know likes amusing cat-related stuff, which was my intended use for it, and while it did vaguely entertain me as I casually emptied my bowels earlier, it did so for less than half an hour, an infinitesimal fraction of the time one could invest in laughing at silly cats on the internet if one were so inclined. Not to mention that the latter is effectively free whereas the book goes for an inexplicable £8.99 recommended retail price. 
   If you're looking for a token gift for someone who does like funny cat-related stuff, then this is, while probably far from the best among the plethora of choices you have, not a bad choice; as long as you don't repeat my mistakes of rendering it ungiftable. I now find myself with a book of cat poetry that I will never re-read and cannot really give away given the situations in which I read it. Ah well. Sometimes that's just life.


Edit [April 2015]: this book was resident in the bathroom of our student house, next to a pair of lavatory trivia books (you know the type). Following a recent house party, it has gone missing, presumed stolen by one of the party-goers. If you're reading this, I unflinchingly forgive you immediately, because, as the rest of this post made clear, it wasn't a book I really desired to retain, and also, it was probably covered in micro-flecks of excreta from spending several months within three feet of our toilet. I also have a reserved sort of admiration for minor inconsequential antisocial acts such as this, so well done you for stealing a book of cat poetry from the bathroom during a party that had so much else to do at it. Enjoy. You could pee on it.
Edit [July 2017]: it occurs to me now that one of my housemates could quite plausibly also have thrown it away, for all the reasons already cited.

The "Northern Monkey" Survival Guide

This book, a slim humourous compendium of trivia on and tributes to the North of England by Tim Collins, was bestowed upon me as a Secret Santa present by my good friend, future housemate and (most importantly) fellow-Yorkshireman Andrew Robertson.

   My current leisure-reading life is largely non-existent, as I have realised with a panic simply how much research for my philosophy essay I haven't done yet and so have been scrutinising lengthy tomes on christian meta-ethics; therefore I can firmly say that to have a book thrust into my life that was deliberately light-heartedly entertaining was a relief, especially with it being one that could quite easily be read in an afternoon of stoic Northern amusement.

   It's not a hugely thought-provoking book, as you'd expect, nor did I have many gripes with it: in the 140ish A5 pages we are toured through the customs, complaints, accents, foods, places, histories, characters, prides and follies that comprise the caricatured cultural landscape of England's top half. To a Northern reader it cannot fail to be pleasantly familiar as it raises a chortle of recognition here and there (there is one part in particular I found extremely funny - a "currency conversion" chart, whereby 35p in the North would get one, say, "crisps" whereas the southern equivalent would be £1.25 for "hand-cut vegetable shavings").

   However, rules is rules, sorry Andrew - having read the book I must react to it somewhat moreso than descriptively, and so here are a few constructive critical responses:

• Having been originally published in 2009, recent events have somewhat skewed the pleasantness of certain folks presented as otherwise grand heroes of the uplands. Leeds doesn't want any cigar-toting paedophile to go down as legend there, thanks.
• On the topic of what celebrities to include - a whole book celebrating the North with literally no mention of Patrick Stewart, Brain Blessed, or Sean Bean? Come on man.
• Though I can (and half-do) forgive this somewhat given the very evident caricatured nature of the book's humour, much of the jokery is a tad classist, sexist, racist, and homophobic, in various parts and degrees, which isn't really okay.

   These aside, this book was expected to provide a diverting afternoon of chuckling and feeling proud about my not-southern roots (psh nobody cares about the Midlands anyway), and that's exactly what it did. It's not a book I ever would have bought myself, but it's the kind of book one can't help but enjoy if one identifies with it; if you're struggling to find a cracking Secret Santa gift for a fellow-Northerner, take a tip from Andrew Robertson and go for this.

   Although most of us wouldn't say no to a chip butty drenched in gravy either.