Tuesday, 31 July 2018

What is the scientific method? Criticisms Standard Definition Steps

What is the scientific method? Why do people believe in the ideas that “science” puts forward?
The scientific method is a system that attempts to separate the bias of being an observer from the observation — letting ‘reality’ show itself in the simplest possible way. The primary steps of which are: systematic and repeatable observation, exact measurements, experiments, and the invention of and repeated (ideally, nearly endless) testing of theories.
It’s a method of investigation based on what’s termed empirical and measurable evidence. Empirical essentially meaning what can be observed with the senses; and measurable meaning what can be repeatedly quantified in a standardized way.
The essential purpose of science is the creation of theories or ‘hypotheses’ that can consistently and reliably explain or reproduce observed phenomena. The scientific method is the method of creating these reliable and reproducible theories.

Criticisms

One of the primary limitations of the scientific method is that it generally disregards inconsistent processes as processes that are simply not yet understood. This entirely misses — and dismisses as flukes — effects that may be caused by systems or processes that are much larger than the theory may cover. Essentially, the limited scope and rigidity of such over-specialized and controlled environments precludes a deeper, more varied understanding of phenomena.
The most fundamental weakness of the scientific method, though, is its assumption that there are consistent ‘laws’ and a ‘uniformity of process’ in the universe. And throughout the constructs that it has created, including ‘space’ and ‘time’.
As many critics of the scientific method have made note of, the controlled environments and instruments that are used in scientific inquiry only really produce answers that are relevant to those same controlled environments and instruments. Science is fundamentally subjective, there is no way for it be truly ‘objective’. All of its verifications are performed from within itself, and relative — being generally biased towards the types of perspectives that are drawn to the method. To put it plainly, science is focused on the consistently repeatable and reliable, and has a blindspot for what appears to be inconsistent — on the limited and controlled scale that it operates.
You could also, rather effectively, argue that the scientific method — and the ways of thinking/living that it supports — are so thoroughly embedded in the stories and culture of our time that its limitations (and an awareness of other approaches) can not be seen very clear to those within said culture. Precluding any real understanding of what the method itself means (and what its effects are) in a larger context — often a stereotype, and/or a defining characteristic of those involved in the scientific professions, is a lack of awareness or understanding of greater contexts.
(Author’s note: Note that I’m addressing the criticisms of the actual method itself, not the way that it is often (mis)practiced in much modern research.)

Standard Definition

The standard definition of the scientific method, — as provided by the Oxford English Dictionary — is: “A method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.”
You could also say that the purpose of the scientific method is to make reliable predictions — no doubt where much of the great appeal and utility of the method originate.
The making of accurate predictions in a wide range of circumstances, to put it another way. And, perhaps (at its ideal), to glimpse the principles behind the actions/behaviors/effects of a phenomena.

Steps

The most basic (and commonly accepted) steps in the process are:

1. Observation/The Formulation Of A Question

This step is one that most people likely participate in many times everyday — why is something the way that it is ? This stage also includes background research and the evaluation of previous experience/evidence.

2. The Formulation Of A Hypothesis

This is the step whereby a question becomes a possible answer — a conjecture based on previously obtained knowledge/experience that attempts to explain the observed behavior of a part of the world.
A simple example would be if you were to hypothesize that the effects of a certain type of air-pollution particle are linked to the development of asthma in some/certain people.
“Terms commonly associated with statistical hypotheses are null hypothesis and alternative hypothesis. A null hypothesis is the conjecture that the statistical hypothesis is false, eg, that the new drug does nothing and that any cures are due to chance effects. Researchers normally want to show that the null hypothesis is false. The alternative hypothesis is the desired outcome, eg, that the drug does better than chance.”
Something important to note — a scientific hypothesis needs to be falsifiable. What that means, is that there must be a possible outcome (or outcomes) that conflicts with the predictions of the hypothesis — without false-ability things can not be usefully tested using the method.

3. Prediction

This is the step whereby the logical consequences of the hypothesis are explored, determined, and made note of. One or more of these predictions are then chosen for further testing.
Ideally the prediction will be something highly unlikely to be true simply by “coincidence”. The prediction should also be clear enough that it can be distinguished from possible alternatives.

4. Testing

This is where the hypothesis (the product of the mind and experience) is brought into contact with the “real world”. An investigation is undertaken to determine whether or not the world/ things are as predicted by the hypothesis. The typical way this is done is through the use of experiments.
The purpose of an experiment is to determine whether observations of the real world agree with or conflict with the predictions derived from an hypothesis. If they agree, confidence in the hypothesis increases; otherwise, it decreases. Agreement does not assure that the hypothesis is true; future experiments may reveal problems. Karl Popper advised scientists to try to falsify hypotheses, i.e., to search for and test those experiments that seem most doubtful. Large numbers of successful confirmations are not convincing if they arise from experiments that avoid risk.”
“Experiments should be designed to minimize possible errors, especially through the use of appropriate scientific controls. For example, tests of medical treatments are commonly run as double-blind tests. Test personnel, who might unwittingly reveal to test subjects which samples are the desired test drugs and which are placebos, are kept ignorant of which are which. Such hints can bias the responses of the test subjects. Furthermore, failure of an experiment does not necessarily mean the hypothesis is false.”

5. Analysis

This is the step whereby the results of the experiment are organized, explored, and compared to the previously made predictions. Specifically, the predictions of the hypothesis should be compared to those of the null hypothesis — in order to determine which better explains the data (leaving a lot of room, in many instances, for interpretation and bias…).
If the experiment is repeated multiple times than a statistical analysis I’d often used.
“If the evidence has falsified the hypothesis, a new hypothesis is required; if the experiment supports the hypothesis but the evidence is not strong enough for high confidence, other predictions from the hypothesis must be tested. Once a hypothesis is strongly supported by evidence, a new question can be asked to provide further insight on the same topic.”

Conclusion

That’s a basic overview of what exactly the scientific method is (and isn’t). Hopefully next time you are reading about the latest scientific finding or discovery you have a better understanding of the process behind the work, and/or a better eye to discern the possible limitations of the work.

The Myth of the Moderate or Centrist...or how to get off your knees.....

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. Desmond Tutu

Over the last few months i have seen certain `moderates` claim that the far right is the same as the radical left and that their postion as centrists is the only valid position. I have seen it claimed ny Peter Nash as well as Gareth Handford in a few cases. I have evn had one Chris Edwards of Neath claiming moderation by thinking that `free speech` should apply to Nazis marching through Jewish areas. so I have put this together as a complete refutation of this inadequate and spurious claim

I grow increasingly tired of the whines of the moderate or centrist What does it really mean to describe yourself that way? I guess it simply means that you are satisfied with your lot and the form in which society finds itself. What does it mean in practice. During the coalition period it meant support for neoliberalism and austerity.. it meant support for benefit cuts and it meant the lack of ability to deeply critique society and it's economy. Political change does come from a centrist position it comes from those who see new possibilities. A long time ago George Bernard Shaw commented that all change really comes from the person who does not accept the status quo. The centrist is a dry dull statistical average of acceptance and prejudice. They are someone who is not ever becoming and dare not dream or act practically to challenge how things are. It risks narcissism and the inability to step outside the self. It's boring and stagnant. It risks and has risked in the support justification for slavery and to deny votes for women. But most of all today it risks the reality of alliwing the far right to peddle it's hate. It also excuses the abject lie of the equivalence of the anti fascist and the anti fascist.

Let's remember it was the centrist party in Weimar that backed Hitler's Enabling act giving him power. The Far right can not be opposed from a centrist position. In fact it was Blair's New Labour that were the midwives of the far right and of UKIP. It was the blunting of a critical socialist ideology that has allowed this equivalence to be claimed. It was this allows the far right to claim that hate speech is free speech and that Tommy Robinson is a the same as the Suffragettes A left winger is a centrist who has got off their knees. A centrist prays to a statistical average of prejudice and ignorance. A right winger prays to a past that never was seen through a mirror tempered by the illusion of self . Only the left winger has got off their knees and sees the future. That's the difference.

The Radical Left and Far Right are as Different as Night and Day.

Different hard-wiring.

Psychologist have determined that liberal and conservative brains literally function quite differently. For example, an examination of the possessions of liberal and conservative college students revealed that the former had more books and travel-memorabilia, while the latter had more items relating to cleaning and organization. This investigation suggested key differences in conservative and liberal mindsets – with one emphasizing self-discipline and order, and the other leaning toward the discovery of new experiences. This hard-wiring gives rise to dramatically different value systems – systems that view the basic ideas like fairness, equality, and even right and wrong in radically different terms.

History is in the eye of the beholder.

The far right and far left have dramatically different interpretations of the past – interpretations which dictate their political stances and calls to action. The far right expresses nostalgia for the past, and actively works to preserve their history, regardless of what that might mean in today’s context. For right-wing Southerners like the members of Save Southern Heritage, this means protecting statues of famous Confederates, and decrying the removal of the Confederate flag from public buildings. Conversely, the far left (and in this case, many liberals) associates the past with its ills – slavery, sexism, and other injustices. History and its institutions are not to be preserved and cherished, but rather, an embarking point from which to begin reform.

Superficial similarities.

When two groups utilize similar tactics, it does not necessarily mean that the groups are one and the same. The Antifa and white nationalist movements exemplify key ideological differences that should not be overlooked. While Antifa and white nationalist movements both express distaste for the government (and even a will to overthrow it), their reasons for these sentiments are rather opposite. Antifa, whose members also frequently identify as anarchists, view government as an instrument of inequality, while white nationalists express hostility toward government because they believe it facilitates equality – a notion that offends those whose identity is built upon a defined racial hierarchy.

Monday, 30 July 2018

Do the far left and the far right ever seem hopelessly similar to you?

Do the far left and the far right ever seem hopelessly similar to you? Horseshoe Theory suggests that the political spectrum is not a straight line with ideologies moving across a line from left to right, but rather a horseshoe, with its farthest outliers bending in toward each other and sharing a number of beliefs. Violent clashes between the far left and far right, at UC Berkeley, in Charlottesville, North Carolina, and recently in Portland, Oregon, have challenged society to take a look at the actions of the far left and far right and ask: To what extent does similarity in action mean similarity in character?

Below, we’ll discuss three ways the far left and far right operate and three ways they couldn’t be more different than night and day.

The Radical Left and Far Right

Victim complex.
People on the outermost poles of the political spectrum often view themselves as aggrieved parties. Interestingly, one study found that having faced adversity – namely violence, loss of a loved one, or experiencing illness or disability – is indeed a predictor of extreme political views; the more adversity people faced, the more likely they were to lean to the far right or far left in their ideologies. Experiencing adversity may explain the rhetoric of victimization that permeates the far left as well as the far right. White Nationalists complain of cultural and economic obliteration at the hands of the multicultural movement and affirmative action, while proponents of the far left demand restitution for the silencing of minority groups via discriminatory legislation and micro-aggressions.

By any means necessary.
Militancy pervades the ranks of the far left and the far right. More than idolizing violent purveyors of their ideologies (think far right’s Hitler to the far left’s Che Guevara), many far right and left movements are vehement in their rejection of non-violence and employ it regularly. Right-wing groups are said to have carried out 150 attacks on US soil – from shooting to bombings – since 1993. Similar crimes have been perpetrated by militant offshoots of left-wing groups, beginning with the 1960’s Weathermen and continuing until today with the Antifa movement.

An idle mind is the devil’s playground.
Scientists have connected boredom to the adoption of extreme political stances, calling youth, wealth, and education the most common risk factors of extremism. Without families to support or even necessarily the need to support themselves, the average college student has more free time than others to develop defined political views. As such, it is hardly surprising that constituents on the far right and far left are overwhelmingly educated and even well-off (a trend that held even for the Hezbollah fighters of the 1980s and 90s).

The Far Left and Far Right Are as Different as Night and Day.

Different hard-wiring.
Psychologist have determined that liberal and conservative brains literally function quite differently. For example, an examination of the possessions of liberal and conservative college students revealed that the former had more books and travel-memorabilia, while the latter had more items relating to cleaning and organization. This investigation suggested key differences in conservative and liberal mindsets – with one emphasizing self-discipline and order, and the other leaning toward the discovery of new experiences. This hard-wiring gives rise to dramatically different value systems – systems that view the basic ideas like fairness, equality, and even right and wrong in radically different terms.

History is in the eye of the beholder.
The far right and far left have dramatically different interpretations of the past – interpretations which dictate their political stances and calls to action. The far right expresses nostalgia for the past, and actively works to preserve their history, regardless of what that might mean in today’s context. For right-wing Southerners like the members of Save Southern Heritage, this means protecting statues of famous Confederates, and decrying the removal of the Confederate flag from public buildings. Conversely, the far left (and in this case, many liberals) associates the past with its ills – slavery, sexism, and other injustices. History and its institutions are not to be preserved and cherished, but rather, an embarking point from which to begin reform.

Superficial similarities.
When two groups utilize similar tactics, it does not necessarily mean that the groups are one and the same. The Antifa and white nationalist movements exemplify key ideological differences that should not be overlooked. While Antifa and white nationalist movements both express distaste for the government (and even a will to overthrow it), their reasons for these sentiments are rather opposite. Antifa, whose members also frequently identify as anarchists, view government as an instrument of inequality, while white nationalists express hostility toward government because they believe it facilitates equality – a notion that offends those whose identity is built upon a defined racial hierarchy.

Pierre Bourdieu, an introduction

Ten years after the death of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, we seem a long way from the days when he severely criticised the world of politics and the media. Sociology students the world over are familiar with concepts such as social reproduction, symbolic violence and cultural capital.
Bourdieu is also the second most frequently quoted author in the world, after Michel Foucault, but ahead of Jacques Derrida, according to the ranking produced by Thomson Reuters (previously the Institute of Scientific Information), which counts citations. "Bourdieu has become the name of a collective research undertaking which disregards borders between disciplines and countries," says Loïc Wacquant, a professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley.
A dream come true, for Bourdieu wanted to set up a "collective intellectual" based on scientific work done as a team sport. "The work of a researcher remains, when it is disseminated and becomes a sort of reflex response," says historian Gérard Noiriel. This is indeed the case for Bourdieu. But "references should not be confused with reverence", Noiriel cautions. "If a line of reasoning is debated, it must be open to question," says fellow historian Christophe Charle.
The sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron, co-author of his first major publications, still considers Bourdieu as a friend, despite their divergence at the beginning of the 1970s. He emphasises the essential contribution of his thinking "Ultimately 'with Bourdieu, against Pierre Bourdieu' does seem to define quite well the influence he had on me, much as on any reader or student who came into contact with his sociological imagination, [which was] an extraordinarily fertile source of hypotheses, concepts and schemas, almost all of which could be reused in the service of empirically relevant theories". But Passeron adds: "They were also likely, particularly due to the force of his most ambitious concepts, to encourage novices to indulge in sterile, mechanical imitation."
Luc Boltanski, a disciple who has distanced himself from his master, was determined not to blindly reproduce the same theory. Much the same is true of Bernard Lahire, who has focused in particular on "the invention of illiteracy". But what is left of his sociology of education, which influenced generations of teachers? After dropping off the radar in the 1980-90s, his ideas are making a comeback, according to Bertrand Geay. "In the past five or six years a new generation of PhD students has started looking at policies to open up the intake of [hothouse] classes préparatoires, at handicaps and over-achievers, and the making of syllabuses," he explains.

But Bourdieu's legacy reaches far beyond education. For one thing his scientific contribution still irrigates many branches of social science. Bourdieusian categories exert increasing influence in the sociology of intellectuals and writers, witness the work of Charle or the sociologist Gisèle Sapiro. His mark is apparent in the application of sociological analysis to justice, to working-class neighbourhoods and youth (Stéphane Beaud, Gérard Mauger), to elites (Michel and Monique Pinçon-Charlot), the family (Rémi Lenoir), and of course the media, the focus of his last publications.
Indeed it is here that Bourdieu's followers have displayed the greatest political commitment and bite. Satirical papers (PLPL or Plan B), non-profits (Acrimed) and films, in particular those directed by Pierre Carle, have broadcast his criticism, bringing it to a larger audience. The recent general release [in France] of Les Nouveaux Chiens de Garde, a film by Gilles Balbastre and Yannick Kergoat, based on the eponymous book by Serge Halimi, is a further instance of this legacy.

At the same time Bourdieu's work has put down roots in other fields including political science and history, thanks to exchanges with historians such as Roger Chartier and the Enlightenment specialist Daniel Roche, with whom he worked at the Collège de France. Many of his expressions have entered everyday language – champ (field), reproduction, domination – making commonplace concepts once the subject of theoretical debate and giving an opus more often celebrated than really read the rigidity of dogma. "I sometimes have the impression that criticism has targeted a Bourdieu who never actually existed," says historian and political scientist Frédérique Matonti. "Often criticism seems to correspond to the way that Bourdieu has been taught, rather than to ideas in his work itself, which are remarkably malleable, never set firm, but constantly reworked."

Among the reasons cited to explain Bourdieu's "return" or "topicality", some highlight his influence on philosophy. While emphasising the importance of his empirical observations, Marie-Anne Lescourret, who published a biography in 2008, points out that some of the notions he used originated in philosophy. This is true of the concept of habitus (dispositions acquired in the course of our education) and the "symbolic forms" – violence, power, capital – which he borrowed from the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who was driven into exile by the Nazis. Bourdieu had his work translated into French and published.
"It's as if there was something wrong with being a sociologist!" Matonti says. "On account of his initial training there certainly is an essential discussion with German philosophy, witness his book The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, a text that could only have been written, or read, by someone with a firm grasp of philosophy. It was also a question of generation: at that time people reasoned for or against phenomenology, for or against Sartre."
Although one of his last books was called Pascalian Meditations, it seems plausible that the key thinker for Bourdieu was not so much Pascal as Spinoza, who has since become a global icon for the radical intellectual left. What impressed the sociologist was the apparently contradictory notion that liberty does not mean casting off our deterministic chains, but rather understanding them.
But according to Passeron the neutral stance specific to scholars was totally foreign to Bourdieu, even if he did on occasion lay claim to that prerogative: "People who were even vaguely familiar with Bourdieu know he was capable of suffering intensely because of the hardness of the human condition, the arrogance or hypocrisy of social domination. "
The unresolved contradiction between commitment and scientific detachment still weighs on anyone reading or interpreting his work.
Could another Bourdieu appear now? Certainly not, says Noiriel: "No single thinker could exert so much influence. Sociological research has gone global, whereas it was only just taking shape in France when Bourdieu established his position."
But does the same apply to the position of a critical intellectual which he embodied, we ask? "Many more people now adopt that stance, but I am still attached to the position he defended as a specialist intellectual, following on from Foucault [...] primarily concerned with mobilising his learning, gained in a particular field of research, without becoming involved in all sorts of other topics."
"Bourdieu rarely spoke out on issues with which he was not familiar," says the sociologist Franck Poupeau, who edited his Political Interventions. From social deprivation to industrial action, his commitment was linked to "a profound understanding of these issues". So, he believes, "another Bourdieu would be possible now, but he would take a different form, that's all."
Bourdieu himself defined sociology as orchestration without a conductor. That orchestra is still playing.

About J.B. Priestley:

Biography

About J.B. Priestley: The Last Great Man of English Letters
John Priestley (he added Boynton later on) was born in Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 13 September 1894. His father, Jonathan, was a pioneering schoolmaster, his mother, Emma, had been a mill girl. Emma died when he was very young, but fortunately his stepmother, Amy, was very kind. Jack, as he was known to the family, enjoyed the rich cultural and social life of prosperous, cosmopolitan and relatively classless Bradford: music hall, football, classical music concerts and family gatherings. Many of his finest novels, plays and memoirs draw on his feelings about this vanished time, particularly “Bright Day” (1946), in which a disillusioned scriptwriter looks back at his golden Bradford adolescence, and “Lost Empires” (1965), recreating the 1913 variety theatre.
Priestley was educated at Belle Vue School, and then worked in a wool office in the Swan Arcade. His main interest by this time however was writing: his first publication was “Secrets of the Ragtime King” for London Opinion, then a series of articles, “Round the Hearth”, for Independent Labour Party publication, The Bradford Pioneer. When the Great War broke out, Priestley volunteered, joining the Duke of Wellington’s West Yorkshire Regiment. After a year of training in southern England, he was sent to the Front in 1915. In “Margin Released” (1962), he reflected on his hellish experiences and the loss of his friends. Seriously injured in June 1916, Priestley returned to England to convalesce, and then trained as an officer. Sent to the Front a second time in 1917, he was gassed and spent the rest of the War in administrative jobs. Although he never wrote in great detail about his war experience it haunted him all his life.

After the War, Priestley studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, thanks to a very small ex-officer’s grant. He excelled academically, but decided to make a career as a writer. With the exception of a book of poems “The Chapman of Rhymes” (1918), which he later denigrated, he had not been in a position to write much during the War years. He moved to London and wrote essays and book reviews for the London Mercury and other periodicals, and published works on literature and a couple of short novels. Collaboration with well-known historical novelist Hugh Walpole on “Farthing Hall” (1929) gave Priestley the financial freedom to write a long picaresque novel, “The Good Companions” (1929). The book won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and earned him an international reputation. His follow-up novel, the darker, London centred “Angel Pavement” (1930), is also much admired.

In the 1930s, Priestley began a new career as a dramatist, a form of writing many have considered best suited to his great talents. His plays were impeccably crafted, sometimes experimental and are characterised by pre-War settings and various perspectives on time, they include: Dangerous Corner” (1932), the Yorkshire comedy “When we are Married” (1938), “I Have Been Here Before” (1937), and, his most famous play, “An Inspector Calls” (1945). The latter combined his fascination with the nature of time with his ideas about society. Priestley’s social conscience was awakened by growing social inequalities in the 1930s, which were unforgettably outlined in “English Journey” (1934), where he raged at the treatment of veterans and the desolation of places like Rusty Lane.
During World War 2, Priestley achieved the peak of his fame and influence in his BBC “Postscripts” broadcasts (1940), in which he inspired many in difficult times by reflecting on the beauty of the English landscape, the gallant little ships at Dunkirk, and a steaming pie in a shop window defying the bombers. However, controversially, he called for social change after the War, so the mistakes made after the previous one and the poor treatment of the returning soldiers would not be repeated.
In the 1950s, Priestley became increasingly politically disillusioned, as the promise of the Labour success in the 1945 election seemed betrayed. In 1957, he once again articulated the mood of many when he wrote “Britain and the Nuclear Bombs” for the New Statesman, expressing his concern at Britain’s development of its own hydrogen bombs, and calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament. The huge postbag received by the paper as a result led to the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Priestley became vice-president, and contributed by writing, broadcasting and public speaking, but he hated committee work, and gratefully took the opportunity to give this up when the president, Bertrand Russell, resigned over the issue of direct action.

Priestley married three times: to Pat, who died tragically young, to Jane, from whom he was divorced, and to archaeologist and poet Jacquetta Hawkes. His marriage to Jacquetta was very happy: they collaborated on books such as “Journey down a Rainbow” (1955), and worked together in CND. “Time and the Priestleys” (1994), by their friend Diana Collins, gives a vivid picture of their later married life and their home at Kissing Tree House near Stratford-on-Avon.
Priestley continued to publish well into the 1970s. He received several honours late in life, including (belatedly) the freedom of the City of Bradford and an honorary degree from Bradford University. He had previously declined both a knighthood and a peerage but in 1977 accepted the Order of Merit, as this was the gift of the sovereign, not party political. He died in 1984.
It is difficult to do justice to the size and range of Priestley’s writings. Alan Day’s bibliography lists over 150 individual published works by him, plus many contributions, prefaces and newspaper articles. While certain themes recur throughout his writing (the danger of the mass media, the delights of music and art, the nature of time), Priestley was always ready to experiment with new formats and genres, from science fiction for children like “Snoggle” (1971), social history such as “The Prince of Pleasure and his Regency” (1969), expressionist drama epitomised by “Johnson over Jordan” (1939), and deep philosophy in “Over the Long High Wall” (1972).
In recent years, there has been a surge in his popularity, thanks among others to the work of the J.B. Priestley Society and to the impact of the astonishingly successful National Theatre production of “An Inspector Calls”. Now Great Northern Books are reprinting his works, scholars are researching his role in shaping Englishness, and his plays are being produced more widely than ever.
Below is a select bibliography of his most important and in some cases his most popular works. For a complete bibliography please visit www.jbpriestley.co.uk

Novels
The Good Companions
Bright Day
Angel Pavement
Lost Empires
Festival at Farbridge
The Image Men
Let the People Sing
Plays
An Inspector Calls
When we are Married
Dangerous Corner
The Linden Tree
Time and the Conways
I Have Been Here Before
Eden End
Johnson over Jordan
A Severed Head (with Iris Murdoch)
Non-fiction
Margin Released – A Writer’s reminiscences
English Journey
Delight
Postscripts
Essays of Five Decades
Literature and Western Man
Journey Down a Rainbow
Please note that new augmented editions of The Good Companions, Bright Day, English Journey and Delight are available at www.gnbooks.co.uk, as is Priestley’s Wars, a compendium of his writings on both World Wars and the founding of CND. Also now available, Modern Delight, a collection of essays by best-loved authors and entertainers following Priestley’s model in Delight. Created for charity, it is available from Waterstones and other booksellers.

Mrs Dalloway: exploring consciousness and the modern world

Elaine Showalter describes how, in Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses stream of consciousness to enter the minds of her characters and portray cultural and individual change in the period following the First World War.

Professor Elaine Showalter explores modernity, consciousness, gender and time in Virginia Woolf’s ground-breaking work, Mrs Dalloway. The film is shot around the streets of London, as well as at the British Library and at Gordon Square in Bloomsbury where Virginia and her siblings lived in the early 20th century. The film offers rare glimpses into the manuscript draft of the novel.

Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) is a novel set on a single day in a city in the middle of June. Woolf, who was re-reading Ulysses when she began to write her own book, chose 13 June 1923, in London; Joyce had selected 16 June 1904, in Dublin. But in making her central figure an upper-class middle-aged woman, married to a Conservative MP, Woolf staked out her own fictional ground. Unlike Joyce’s characters, Clarissa Dalloway is not mythologised, and the stages of her day are not compared to a classical epic. Indeed, by emphasising her heroine’s marital status in the title, Woolf draws our attention to the way Mrs Dalloway is an ordinary woman of her time, defined in terms of her husband, her identity submerged in his, even her first name erased by her social signature. Clarissa begins her day shopping for flowers for her party that evening, and thinking 'What a lark!' It’s easy to see her as superficial and slight. Yet following her thoughts, memories, anxieties and epiphanies from morning to night on the day when she is preparing to give a large party, and entering the minds of the people she passes or meets, we see a broad and deep cross section of London, five years after the Armistice.

Notebook drafts of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (Volume II)

‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’: The opening page from a manuscript draft of Mrs Dalloway, 1924.
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Usage terms © The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work.

Ulysses by James Joyce, published by Shakespeare and Company

Serialised 1918–20 and published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses, like Mrs Dalloway, is set on a single day in June.
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Capturing the impact of cultural change

Woolf used Clarissa to explore the personal impact of cultural change, from the new technologies of automobiles, airplanes and movies, to the new openness of marital and sexual relationships and the beginnings of political upheaval. In planning the novel, Woolf had wished ‘to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense’.^[1] Five years have passed since the Armistice, and Peter Walsh, returning for the first time since the war, is struck by the changes: ‘People looked different. Newspapers seemed different.’ There are major changes in English society as well. Alex Zwerdling has argued that indeed Mrs Dalloway is a ‘sharply critical’ examination of the ‘governing class’ at the turning-point of its power. In 1923, there were two Conservative prime ministers – Bonar Law, who resigned because of ill health, and Stanley Baldwin, who succeeded him in May – but in January 1924 the party was voted out, and Ramsay MacDonald would become the first Labour prime minister. Clarissa's class 'is living on borrowed time. Its values … are under attack … the empire was crumbling fast’. Woolf also wanted to connect the class system and the gender system, linking the subordination of the working class to the subordination of women. In a famous essay called ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), she argued that since 1920, ‘all human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.’^[2] Neither character nor these relationships, she maintained, could be sufficiently represented by the literary conventions of the Edwardians, such as reliance on material evidence and external fact. ‘For us,’ she dramatically asserts, ‘those conventions are ruin, those tools are death’.

'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' by Virginia Woolf

‘All human relations have shifted’: From Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown’, 1924.
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Usage terms Virginia Woolf: © The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work. Vanessa Bell: © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett. Except as otherwise permitted by your national copyright laws this material may not be copied or distributed further.

Stream of consciousness

The method she used, the representation of the stream of consciousness, reflected her need to go beyond the clumsiness of the factual realism in the novels of her Edwardian precursors, such as Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy, and find a more sensitive, artistic and profound way to represent character, an effort shared with her contemporaries D H Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Marcel Proust. In the 1920s, psychoanalysis was uncovering a multi-layered self in which dreams, memories and fantasies were as important as actions and thought. (The Hogarth Press, run by Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf, began to publish an English translation of Freud in 1921.) Philosophers were describing the self as the receiver of a tumult of sensations. Cubist artists combined multiple perspectives on their subjects to add an extra dimension to each of their paintings. Woolf believed that the omniscient narrator of the 19th-century novel had to be replaced by a narration from multiple perspectives as well; many points of view and many voices should be included. She was intrigued by the new medium of film, and her narrative technique is very cinematic, including flashbacks, montage, rapid cuts and panning between various characters as they respond to an external event, such as the aeroplane overhead. (The novel is historically accurate in its references; the first skywriter appeared in London in August 1922.) Woolf tunnelled into the memories and associations of each character to give them depth, and to bring the past into a single-day novel.

Virginia Woolf's travel and literary notebook, 1906–09

Virginia Woolf’s concept of the stream of consciousness technique can be traced back as early as 1908, when she wrote in her travel notebook: ‘I achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords; showing all the traces of the mind’s passage through the world; achieve in the end, some kind of whole made of shivering fragments’.
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Letter from Duncan Grant to J M Keynes about the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, 1912

Cubist works of art strongly featured at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1912, organised by Virginia Woolf’s friends Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Duncan Grant.
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Usage terms Duncan Grant: © Estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2106. Except as otherwise permitted by your national copyright laws this material may not be copied or distributed further. Unknown photographer (pre-1906): This material is in the Public Domain.

'The Cinema' by Virginia Woolf, from The Nation and Athenaeum

'The Cinema' by Virginia Woolf, from The Nation and Athanaeum

Virginia Woolf’s essay on cinema and the new medium of film, 1926.
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Composition

We know a lot about the composition of Mrs Dalloway between 1922 and 1924. Woolf’s holograph draft, called ‘The Hours’, is in the British Library, and her working notes are in the New York Public Library. She also treated the themes of the novel in an early group of short stories, collected as Mrs Dalloway’s Party, and discussed her writing process in her journal and letters. One central problem she faced was how to organise the flow of perceptions and memories; she did not want to have chapters with titles interrupting the illusion of a spontaneous stream of consciousness. She considered having a Greek chorus speak at intervals to sum everything up; she thought about dividing the text like the acts of a play. Finally, she decided to mark off sections with a double space; in the British edition published by the Hogarth Press, there are 12 spaces, like the hours on a clock. The striking of Big Ben further serves to punctuate the narrative. A central motif of the book is the analogy between the hours of the day and the female life cycle – what we would now call the biological clock. Woolf places Mrs Dalloway in the middle, and surrounds her with female characters ranging from 18 to over 80. As she was working on the various drafts, Woolf grew confident in her techniques and goals: ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.’^[3]

Notebook drafts of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (Volume II)

‘There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable’: Big Ben strikes the narrative, from the manuscript draft of Mrs Dalloway, 1924.
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Taking steps towards the grave

Although it is never directly stated in the novel, Clarissa, at the age of 52, has gone through menopause, and she has internalised the medical attitudes which saw the change of life as a hopeless process of decline. Having lost her youthful beauty, and lacking an occupation or an independent social role, she fears that the drama of her life has ended. Climbing the stairs to her room for a midday nap, she feels that she is taking the first steps towards the grave: ‘There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe … Narrower and narrower her bed would be.’ In midlife, Clarissa thinks she must divest herself of her sexuality, give up her physical self, and adjust to solitude, loneliness and the inevitable shrinking of her social space and opportunities. The attic room and the narrow bed are symbols of death.

Septimus Smith

Mrs Dalloway deals with people’s ability to cope with change – ageing, class mobility, war and peace, the ‘change of life’. Woolf contrasts Clarissa’s crisis with the despair of Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran suffering from mental disturbances. His day is juxtaposed to hers, and his paranoid suspicions, vivid hallucinations and distorted perceptions are in sharp contrast to her orderly ones. In her early notes for the novel, Woolf imagined Septimus as a crazed terrorist plotting to avenge the generation of young men slaughtered and damaged in the Great War by assassinating the prime minister. Draft by draft, however, she turned him into a victim of ‘shell shock’, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Emotionally numbed by the war, grieving the death of his dearest friend Evans, angry at the society that seems to collude with destruction, guilt-ridden at his inability to care for his wife, Septimus becomes vulnerable to a psychotic break much worse than the neurotic symptoms caused by the traumas of combat. The extremity of his illness reflects the conditions of his society, one in which the emotional after-effects of the war have been evaded, self-control is worshipped and feelings have been suppressed.
Woolf drew on her own experience of madness to present his delusions, and to condemn the obtuse, even brutal doctors Holmes and Bradshaw, who fail to understand his terror, and attempt to have him committed to a clinic for a rest cure. The war seems to have left the ‘governing classes’ curiously untouched. They continue in their routines of civilised luncheons, letters to The Times, Academy paintings of sunsets and cows, and professional management. To escape them all, Septimus commits suicide by leaping from a window.

A life-affirming pageant

Woolf had intended the party which ends the novel to express ‘life in every variety & and full of anticipation; while S. dies’. For Clarissa, it is a happy occasion. Re-meeting the prosperous mother of five who had long ago been the object of her schoolgirl crush, and talking to Peter Walsh, a restless immature man she might have married, she affirms the choices she has made. The guests who gather in her bright home come from an upper-class London society that includes the pompous, the frivolous, the narrow-minded and the snobbish, as well as some lost souls she has included out of kindness. Yet behind their decorous façades, Woolf shows us their hidden memories and troubled feelings, especially fears of ageing and death; and Clarissa senses the bravery of their performances. At the height of the party, she abruptly learns from Dr Bradshaw that one of his patients, a young soldier, had killed himself that afternoon. Shocked at the news, she retreats to a little room to meditate in solitude on the great unanswerable questions of meaning, mortality and purpose. She emerges with an understanding of the party as a life-affirming communal pageant. The internal changes Clarissa undergoes during her day mirror the transformations in her society. Despite its obsession with loneliness and death, Mrs Dalloway is a compassionate and optimistic novel, ending as it begins, with a tribute to endurance, survival, fellowship and joy.

Notebook drafts of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (Volume III)

Scene depicting Mrs. Dalloway after hearing of Septimus’ death, from the manuscript draft of Mrs Dalloway, 1924.
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Footnotes

[1] The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume II 1920–1924, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeiliee (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), p. 248 (entry for 19 June 1923).
[2] Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3. 1919–1924, ed. by Andrew McNellie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), pp. 420–36 (p. 422).
[3] The Diary of Virginia Woolf, p. 186 (entry for 26 July 1922).
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Gramsci for today....Corbyn and the black swan

Every thirty five year or so we see a shift in the assumptions of politics. In 1945 a Labour government created the Welfare state and the assumptions that dominated till 1979. In the general election of last year we saw the same process. It was presaged by the rise of the Green party in the run up to the election of 2015 and to the Scottish referendum of 2014. Similar cracks could be seen in the Brexit phenomena and in Trumps victory of November 2016. For some few years before this we have witnessed across Europe a struggle between two competing ideas those of the populist authoritarian right and those of the populist Left. Examples have been seen across Europe with the rise of Melanchron in the France Presidential and of Syriza in Greece and Podermos in Spain.
I have noticed a gradual changing of views, perceptions and observations over the last few weeks and indeed months. I speak to all sorts of people, taxi drivers, people I meet on buses, clients and others. I have noticed this trend for a significant length of time. The shift has been happening of course for much longer. There are always critics and alternative approaches existing in any society. The critical time comes when a preceding political common-sense has so many cracks and imperfections that it shatters and it takes a collective psychological shift to fully bring into awareness. It is the black swan moment that seemed inevitable after it occurred and yet was not seen before.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn wrote that "the successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science" (p. 12).
Paradigm shifts tend to appear in response to the accumulation of critical anomalies as well as the proposal of a new theory with the power to encompass both older relevant data and explain relevant anomalies. New paradigms tend to be most dramatic in sciences that appear to be stable and mature, as in physics at the end of the 19th century. At that time, a statement generally attributed to physicist Lord Kelvin famously claimed, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." Fi years later, Albert Einstein published his paper on special relativity, which challenged the set of rules laid down by Newtonian mechanics, which had been used to describe force and motion for over two hundred years. In this case, the new paradigm reduces the old to a special case in the sense that Newtonian mechanics is still a good model for approximation for speeds that are slow compared to the speed of light. Many philosophers and historians of science, including Kuhn himself, ultimately accepted a modified version of Kuhn's model, which synthesizes his original view with the gradualist model that preceded it. Kuhn's original model is now generally seen as too limited

Kuhn's idea was itself revolutionary in its time, as it caused a major change in the way that academics talk about science. Thus, it may be that it caused or was itself part of a "paradigm shift" in the history and sociology of science. However, Kuhn would not recognize such a paradigm shift. Being in the social sciences, people can still use earlier ideas to discuss the history of science.
The idea of a ‘third face of power’, or ‘invisible power’ has its roots partly, in Marxist thinking about the pervasive power of ideology, values and beliefs in reproducing class relations and concealing contradictions (Heywood, 1994: 100). Marx recognised that economic exploitation was not the only driver behind capitalism, and that the system was reinforced by a dominance of ruling class ideas and values – leading to Engels famous concern that ‘false consciousness’ would keep the working class from recognising and rejecting their oppression (Heywood, 1994: 85).

False consciousness, in relation to invisible power, is itself a ‘theory of power’ in the Marxist tradition. It is particularly evident in the thinking of Lenin, who ‘argued that the power of ‘bourgeois ideology’ was such that, left to its own devices, the proletariat would only be able to achieve ‘trade union consciousness’, the desire to improve their material conditions but within the capitalist system’ (Heywood 1994: 85). A famous analogy is made to workers accepting crumbs that fall off the table (or indeed are handed out to keep them quiet) rather than claiming a rightful place at the table.
The Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned for much of his life by Mussolini, took these idea further in his Prison Notebooks with his widely influential notions of ‘hegemony’ and the ‘manufacture of consent’ (Gramsci 1971). Gramsci saw the capitalist state as being made up of two overlapping spheres, a ‘political society’ (which rules through force) and a ‘civil society’ (which rules through consent). This is a different meaning of civil society from the ‘associational’ view common today, which defines civil society as a ‘sector’ of voluntary organisations and NGOs. Gramsci saw civil society as the public sphere where trade unions and political parties gained concessions from the bourgeois state, and the sphere in which ideas and beliefs were shaped, where bourgeois ‘hegemony’ was reproduced in cultural life through the media, universities and religious institutions to ‘manufacture consent’ and legitimacy (Heywood 1994: 100-101).
The political and practical implications of Gramsci’s ideas were far-reaching because he warned of the limited possibilities of direct revolutionary struggle for control of the means of production; this ‘war of attack’ could only succeed with a prior ‘war of position’ in the form of struggle over ideas and beliefs, to create a new hegemony (Gramsci 1971). This idea of a ‘counter-hegemonic’ struggle – advancing alternatives to dominant ideas of what is normal and legitimate – has had broad appeal in social and political movements. It has also contributed to the idea that ‘knowledge’ is a social construct that serves to legitimate social structures (Heywood 1994: 101).

In practical terms, Gramsci’s insights about how power is constituted in the realm of ideas and knowledge – expressed through consent rather than force – have inspired the use of explicit strategies to contest hegemonic norms of legitimacy. Gramsci’s ideas have influenced popular education practices, including the adult literacy and consciousness-raising methods of Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), liberation theology, methods of participatory action research (PAR), and many approaches to popular media, communication and cultural action.
The idea of power as ‘hegemony’ has also influenced debates about civil society. Critics of the way civil society is narrowly conceived in liberal democratic thought – reduced to an ‘associational’ domain in contrast to the state and market – have used Gramsci’s definition to remind us that civil society can also be a public sphere of political struggle and contestation over ideas and norms. The goal of ‘civil society strengthening’ in development policy can thus be pursued either in a neo-liberal sense of building civic institutions to complement (or hold to account) states and markets, or in a Gramscian sense of building civic capacities to think differently, to challenge assumptions and norms, and to articulate new ideas and visions.

Both Gramsci and Kuhn have value in explaining the events of last year's general election. We have seen the Blairites and the political commentators "eat humble pie” as they seek to explain what happened. It is often the case that the supporters of an earlier paradigm have neither the ability or have the language to realise a paradigm shift till it has happened. Suddenly every body has changed their mind. The animosities and dialetics have shifted consciousness and now there is a new way of seeing and doing and being.

Polls now show Labour to be ahead and an equal number of people now see Corbyn as Prime Minister. Some of us have seen the change coming for several years and what we once said that was laughed at is rapidly becoming mainstream.Thinkers like Paul Masson, Yanis Varoufakisand, Picketty represented a new approach. Figures like Russell Brand also represented a current similar to this and even the return of two party politics indicates that the paradigm has now shifted. It will become increasingly difficult to think in the ways of the previous one. The Conservative party looks out of time and tired. A change has begun a new current in political awareness is taking shape and the question is not if Jeremy Corbyn can clearly win and it is now the question when?...... there are still many who cannot comprehend what has happened but the time of critical mass has occurred. Some reading this will have no idea what I am writing about others will understand and reflect. Come what may we have seen the shift happen.......the black Swan event is here and has landed.

A black swan is an event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and is extremely difficult to predict; the term was popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a finance professor, writer and former Wall Street trader. Black swan events are typically random and are unexpected. When George Osbourne predicts the collapse of the Tory Party and reveals the fantasy of Brexit we know Gramschi riding on a very large Black swan has arrived in style....and his name now is Jeremy Corbyn...let us fear the pessimism of the intellect but celebrate the optimism of the will...anomalies and contradictions abound as all that was once solid melts into the air....

Friday, 27 July 2018

500,000 Thank Yous..lets make it one Million

The Blog "All Too Human" was launched on October 26th 2015. I am pleased to tell you that we have now had over 500,000 hits by today Friday 27th 2018. Lets make it a million soon. Here are the statistics for the sceptical. a particular synchronicity is that it occured on the Blood Moon of july 27th...odd that Thank you Martyn Shrewsbury