Σκέπτομαι?

The word sceptic is being bandied about at the moment - coming into disrepute as meaning 'head-in-the-sand' refusal to admit to the possibility that humans might be creating climate change. As someone who believes it's very likely we are causing climate change, I'm also one who, when it comes to trying to understand, digest and draw conclusions from the scientific information on climate change, strives to be a sceptic.

The original version of scepticism was about denying the possibility of knowing anything. Skeptomai which connects to Classical thinking about the possibility of proving things to be inalienably true translates as 'to look about, to consider' - in these terms the best you can hope for is a considered opinion about the likelihood that something's true. So if I jump off a roof it's only my 'considered opinion' that I could suffer serious injury or worse. Hm. That interpretation of scepticism can be distinguished from scientific (or empirical) scepticism which involves a disposition to question the reliability of certain kinds of claims by subjecting them to systematic investigation. Scientific method details the specific process by which this investigation of reality is conducted - which means that anyone who tries to think scientifically ought to be sceptical, even when investigating the climate. This is why the distinction ought to be - but isn't - made between climate change sceptics as people who think scientifically about the nature of climate change - and climate change deniers, who argue, as an article of faith, that climate change is either not happening or that if it is, it isn't caused by humans. The converse to this is that, of course, the world is full of people who believe, as an article of faith, that climate change is happening and is caused by humans.

Amid the passionate urgency of the present, some scientific thinking about the data available on climate change has become conflated with denial of climate change and its causation. The noise of political debate - polarised and vehement - has submerged scientific discourse, presaging, if not religious war, confrontation between those of different faiths. There's a point here about incommensurable ways of looking at the world.

Long ago Jack drew me a diagram describing what happens when cogent differences between academics go public. It was a snake-like line that started small and grew largest at the foot of the paper. My stepfather placed crosses at each curve of the snake. "At the top you could have two scientists debating the interpretation of evidence - opposed but arguing politely across a small table.

Further down you have social gatherings - seminars, colloquia - in which contrary views on a subject of public interest are debated before a robust chairman in a setting where accepted etiquette proscribes ad hominem abuse and good behaviour overrules hostility in the expression of opposing views. Continuing down the diagram, separation between opposing positions becomes greater, the quality of debate declines, politeness goes out of the window and followers of one side throw verbal abuse at the followers of the other.

At the bottom of the 'snake' fervent followers of those sober academic debaters are refereed by ranks of riot police - surrogates for the enemy, representatives of the state - amid smoke, flames, teargas, fire-hoses, batons and broken glass.

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I asked Lin the other day "Are you a sceptic about climate change?" "Yes" A pause. "That doesn't mean I don't think we're crazy to keep relying on fossil fuels, when we have solar, wind, wave and geothermal energy to hand. It also doesn't mean that I don't believe the climate's changing right now. I'm just not convinced that present changes are so different from earlier changes before we were around, which again doesn't mean I don't think there's urgent need to adapt to what's happening." Pondering the practical implications of her views I found it difficult to see how these would be different if she was convinced by the available evidence that climate change is caused by humans. She reserves as much moral opprobrium for those who waste energy, create pollution and evade the practical implications of recycling and sustainable living as someone who's convinced, or like me, pretty damn sure, humans are causing climate change.

[see Elizabeth Farrelly on this - the writing alone, from this Phd in Architecture, delights, especially coining the term minchinsaur to make fun of Senator Nick Minchin:

Think of it as risk management. If the climate-changers are wrong, and we go that way, we still end up with a clean world, free of oil-addiction, and a new industrial revolution to ride for the next millennium. And we get to stand for something, for once. Whereas if the deniers are wrong, we'll be found, petrified, with our pants down, facing the rear view, kissing our arses goodbye. This is what renders Phil Jones' climate-gate treason unpardonable. In fudging the crucial facts, Professor Jones and his colleagues fed the Minchinsaur deniers steroids, strengthening their inertia and encouraging the very catastrophe they hoped to avert. I'd suggest burning at stake, but for the fossil-fuel emissions.]

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From Helena Smith, Guardian - 13/12/09: George Papandreou will be in Brussels to announce his government plans to curb the spiraling debt and deficit that led to Greece's recent credit downgrade. He's also talking to union and business representatives about the medicine needed to recover the Greek economy. Greece’s eurozone partners want drastic measures, especially tough public sector salary cuts like Ireland's. Analysts from Moody’s will be in Athens today following the downgrade by Fitch and a warning from Standard & Poor’s.

Tomorrow Papandreou meets opposition party leaders to discuss how to curb corruption which he's described as "endemic in Greek society" including tax evasion. Finance Minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou speaks of bringing in a “completely different type of taxation” to crack down on this. Other structural reforms include opening up 'closed shop' occupations – including notaries and accountants – and much-delayed social security reform

[18 December 2009 Malcolm Brabant 'Greece caught between voracious bankers and militant workers'] [7 December 09: Swiftian irony in a Nikos Konstandaras op-ed from Kathimerini on new tourist ideas 'Live your myth in Greece']

** ** ** Sir Ken Macdonald had choice words in today's Times about Mr Blair's 'deadly war ... entirely the work of warriors cast carelessly into death's way by a Prime Minister lost in self-aggrandisement and a governing class too closed to speak truth to power.'

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My cycle ride home takes me through the Birmingham Christmas Market where amid the crowds I drink a mug of mulled cider and an enjoy a Kraków sausage and watch the roundabout; not an arid device full of circling cars but a Carousel with an organ playing and lots of bright lights and shiny things!

Melbourne

John's old friend Jeff Floyd lent me his fine bicycle which I collected this morning from a floor high over central Melbourne, heading south along the Yarra to the shore at St Kilda, still far from the swells of real ocean but sandy and blue and built-up, just kilometers from the vertiginous architecture of this great city. The great interior and the vast uninhabited ocean shores remain remote, but for glimpses through a plane window and the genius of the indigenous genii who’s art seen this afternoon, when I cycled back to the city, has imparted something of what I’ve yet to learn; something which D.H.Lawrence in his genius seem to miss - 'this speechless country'. No longer and I don't mean just the Mabo Case or Paul Keating's Redfern Address, or Kevin Rudd's magnificent speech on 13 February 2008, or the Aboriginal Tent Embassy which I saw when John cycled me around central Canberra, but an epic - known and yet to be known - that will flow into future understanding of Australia and the world.

The recovery of Terra Nullius

I've been gazing entranced at the work of H.J.Wedge, Samantha Hobson, Julie Dowling, Gordon Hoskey, Treahna Hamme and, respect to Geoffrey Bardon, at the great mural Napperby Death Spirit Dreaming by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.

But why turn my experience of a few weeks in Australia into painting by numbers? What might be fun would be to see how my judgements shift; what changes these swift weeks have made in my character.

There's the sense of understanding more about the negotiated space between politics and management, through the thinking of John Martin, now friend and colleague, studying the relationship in Australia; from John’s and Annie’s film – especially – of the conversation between the Mayor and CEO of Marion. This demonstrated the way a role-determined tension between political aspiration and managerially stewarded limits - legal, technical, financial - is resolved – over and over, by unique individuals who get better and better at it.

That demonstration of the personal workings of government also shone a light on the position and role of professionals in that mix whose grammar we’re striving to make more intelligible. Here there’s a professional who cares so much about the difference between almonds and jacarandas as part of the landscape of a street - a place - fretting about root-falls on understreet services – invisible to most. We’re still parsing this conversation. John’s used it on his own with one set of managers and councillors. I will use it in England – an exploration of how managers broker the relationship between the professionals and the politicians in government – made real In animated conversation between leaders - politicians and managers - at the apex, negotiating overlapping spheres of activity and interest.

As my train on Monday morning hurried south to Melbourne, through Castlemain, Malmesbury, Kyneton, Macedon, I drank up the landscape washed by a weekend of steady rain, still insufficient to fill the creeks and lakes so thirsty is the land itself, our speed at moments blending iron bark, grass, corrugated iron, yellow red stone, and clouds that reach beyond horizons I've glimpsed over a wing.

From my comfortable and inexpensive seat on the train I see stretches of the road on which I’ve been driven several times to Melbourne Airport to catch airplanes to the edges of the continent – Perth, Darwin (via Alice Springs), Brisbane, Canberra, Sydney, Adelaide and Launceston. We calculated, John and I, that by the time I’m home I’ll have travelled 47000 kilometres, over 29000 miles. I asked an environmental campaigner about this at the conference at Bendigo on Energy Futures, after he’d shown us a clever clip of flight movements across the world. He had no imperative. He mentioned George Monbiot pondering the same. Could you give up friends made across the world through the benefits of flight? “He calls them love miles"

*** *** *** I sent Paul in Agios Ioannis some pieces from the blog that might interest him for the December Newsletter, having failed so far to put together thoughts on the reciprocity between Ionians and successive Lords High Commissioners during the Protectorate - the theme of my chat this February at the Durrell School. 'Paul, would any of these do?':

Some of the most beautiful in Northern Greece - Koliopoulos on 'plundered loyalties' in Macedonia

Yearning Burning Earning and again - the commodification of Greek land, the 2009 fires in Athens and the Hellenic Cadastre

The missing commentary - The Parthenon Marbles

"Which side then has committed more crimes - right or left?" - ο Eμφύλιος.

Bad building on Corfu

Long ago in Aegina - Yannis Moralis and my Greek stepmother, Maria Roussen

Shades of grey. Corfu in winter

The curse of bottled water

Consumerism - upon which most of us depend...

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Greece and Melbourne mingle in my current reading - Christos Tsiolkas' Loaded - an excellent introduction to the city - East, North, South and West - for the average tourist with guidance on places to visit. I'm jesting. This is a Melbourne Sorrows of Young Werthe written in 1995, made into the film Head on, driven by the manic confusions of voluntary transportation to Australia, Greek parents with peasant roots who require land to feel secure, who 'migrated to escape the chaos of history' who 'know fundamentally, property is war' that:

Possession of land, of more and more land, is the means by which an uneducated, diasporic community enables itself to rise in the New World and kick their brothers and sisters in the face, in the balls, in the cunt. p.143

This Australian sturm und drang is unremittingly ugly - sexual and substance self-harm dancing to music that hurts and endless arguments of the kind that makes troubled youth so bloody irritating to the forgetful old - who've got their own problems. Wimpishly, I felt like hiding the book's well-lit pages from neighbours on the plane lest they think I'm reading porn, albeit funded by the Australian Council for the Arts. Ari, Tsiolkas' loaded antihero, loathes cars and suburbs and a lot of other things including the 'weakness' of his Greek parents. He was already 30 when Loaded was published. The book's unconsoling vigour brought to mind E.M.Forster in Passage to India, which I mined for A-Level 40 years ago:

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself,, or , “I am horrified,” we are insincere.

As an Englishman with mainly Scots roots, linked through my dad to a Greek stepmother and half Greek family set of sisters and half-bro, and parents who divorced in 1949, brought up by my mother and stepfather now living in inner-city Birmingham and the most congenially beautiful village in Corfu and re-visiting Australia, Tsiolkas' rich writing speaks of a misery in being young that I only half recall if at all, being largely distracted from self-harm by the ocean and all the possibilities of a life privileged by the imagination and talent of those closest to me, and located by English private boarding schools from the age of six - an indoctrination so robust I didn't start to peel it away until I was into my 30s, largely impervious until then that a peel even existed, and wasn't something that I could being to write about until I was well into my 50s, when I'd assembled some experience. I'll read more of Tsiolkas, as also Tim Winton, and thank the Brisbane bookshop owner who pitched me at just two consummate artists to be going on with, narrating the history of Australia as surely as its great physical explorers, matching the new cartography of its emerging indigenous artists.

[Back to the future 17 December 09: A finely written diatribe by the Sydney columnist Elizabeth Farralley, against suburbs and MacMansions and Australia's love affair with ugliness - see the comments too]

*A very different take on the Greek diaspora, comes from Stavros, author of My Greek Odyssey:

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The image that will remain in my head is the Tjapaltjarris' night sky inside Napperby Death Spirit Dreaming and Lorenzo's words in The Merchant of Venice

Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins; Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

It reminded me of Richard's picture last year when he stayed with us in Ano Korakiana.

and...

HR 5171 (back to the future March 2014)