In the context of my current reading (Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden), Johann Hari’s column in today’s The Independent merits quoting (with all the standard legal disclaimers with respect to copyright and fair use) in full:

Yes, folks, it’s not just about ‘bad government’.

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“consider a poor person in the countryside of Tanzania who wants to get a pothole repaired in front of his house. … If IBRD, IMF, UNDP, FAO, WTO, EU, WHO, AfDB, DFID, and USAID approve the PRSP and release new funds to the national government, then the government will allocate the money in accordance with the MTEF, PER, CDF, PRGF, PRSC, and PRSP, after which the money will pass through the provincial governments and the district governments, and the district government may or may not repair the pothole in front of the poor person’s house.” (Easterly, 2006, pp.173 & 175)

Yes, I’m still reading William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden. And, yes, it still makes a great deal more sense than the above paragraph might suggest. Alternatively (changing my spectacles) it in fact makes sense in exactly the way that the above paragraph might suggest. (The chapter is entitled, unsurprisingly, ‘The Rich Have Markets, the Poor Have Bureaucrats’.)

References

Easterly, W. (2006). The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good. New York: The Penguin Press. ISBN: 1594200378. [Amazon]

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I went with Jatti Bredekamp yesterday to see the ‘Wilberforce table’ (more correctly, the ‘Buxton table’, since it was around this table in Thomas Buxton’s house that the key abolitionists met to hammer out the draft of the bill that would lead to the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833) at The Old Town Hall, Stratford, where antiques expert Chris Wilde is blueprinting the replica to be built for the Museum of London’s traveling exhibition as part of its 1807-2007 bicentenary of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Jatti, in his capacity as CEO of the Iziko Museums of Cape Town to which the replica will be traveling in May, had long been looking forward to seeing the original table, on display at The Old Town Hall from Thursday 19th April to Friday 25th May 2007 as part of the Borough of Newham’s own bicentennial exhibition, The Wickedest of Cargoes.

Chris explained to us some of the difficulties he faced in designing the replica. The understructure is clearly not original; the supporting four wooden pillars are also probably not original; though the matching wood-staining of the legs and body suggest that the legs are original. Had it originally been built as a revolving table? and had there therefore originally been a single supporting pillar? Chris explained to us how such a table would have been used by, for example, rent collectors who would have labelled each of the eight drawers either by a day of the week or by alphabetical name of client (A-C, D-F, etc). Since all that now remains is a lone “F” on one of the drawers, he’s not sure how they would originally have been labelled. He is also unable to open the drawers, clumsily secured with modern screws in the 1990s when the table, long in pieces, had been reassembled.

Chris drew our attention to another interesting link that the table has with slavery: the mahogany top, stained to look like teak, had been made from wood imported from the West Indies and undoubtedly cut by slave labour.

Jatti and I then walked on down the road to the Theatre Royal in Stratford, long home to Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop Company, where actor and playwright John Matshikiza’s play, Turning the Tables, commissioned by the Museum of London, is to be performed, with the replica table, in October at the end of its tour of Cape Town and Barbados. John’s play is wonderful. I read and reviewed the first draft of it back last Summer, making a few suggestions for revision. My strongest reaction was that, as I put it to John, one would need three PhDs to identify and understand the significance of every (sometimes oblique) reference: with its sweep over more than two millennia of history, a geographical compass taking in much of the globe from 5th century Athens to Tarik ibn Zayed’s Andoulasia to Toussaint Louverture’s Haiti, and its plethora of cultural references from Joseph Conrad to Archie Shepp, it’s an awesome work but—I suggested—one that might only be appreciated after the performance when the audience had had a chance to take home and study the script. I looked through the second draft last December when June and I met up with John in Cape Town: it’s now a little more accessible but I figure it should now stay as sublimely challenging as it is. Who, after all, would suggest a dumbing down of Joyce’s Ulysses or Pound’s Cantos?

Further reading

Museum of London Group, ‘London and the transatlantic slave trade: Plans for 2007/2008 at Museum in Docklands’.

Abolition200: The Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Website funded by the Awards for All programme and maintained by the 24 Hour Museum with support from the Museum Libraries and Archives Council (MLA).

HM Government, ‘Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act’ [PDF1] [PDF2]

24hourMuseum, ‘Museum In Docklands To Lift Lid On London’s Role In The Slave Trade’.

24hourMuseum, ‘London’s Museum In Docklands Obtains Unique Slave Trade Archive’.

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I’ve not yet read either Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (the paperback edition reviewed briefly in The Independent this weekend) or Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, though look forward to (when I’ve the time) reading both. (Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation also, I note on Amazon, seem to come highly recommended … so much to read, so little time … [sigh].)

One of my two reasons for wishing to read them is, naturally, to gain a broader and better understanding of why, in the authors’ professional views, people are deluded into embracing religion—and I suspect that Dennett, as a philosopher of mind, may of the two turn out to be for me personally, as a cognitive scientist, the more interesting.

Since the purpose of the books is (presumably) not only to offer naturalistic explanations for the emergence and persistence of religion but also, as an ineluctable (though not unintended) consequence, to persuade the reader that religious belief is delusional, the second of my motives for wishing to read them is to scrutinise the books as discourse, as writing, as scholarly argumentation, as reasoned polemic; and to consider, in that light, how likely it is that “true believers” will engage with the texts with open minds and an unprejudiced willingness to reflect upon and weigh the arguments on their own terms. My very strong suspicion is that I already know the answer: “true believers” will trash the books with a prejudicial rhetoric and a welter of counter-’evidence’ that pay no serious attention at all to the arguments made. And this will, of course, give me—as I wade through the Christian rebuttals on the web and in print—a voluminous body of text that, wearing my discourse analyst’s hat, I can use as primary sources in my ongoing examination of (ir)rationality.

In that spirit, from Richard Dawkins’ web site I followed a link to the delightfully titled site, Why Does God Hate Amputees, also at: Why Wont God Heal Amputees, apparently the work of Marshall Brain (of How Stuff Works fame). The core argument is encapsulated in a simple and ingenious experiment:

For this experiment, we need to find a deserving person who has had both of his legs amputated. For example, find a sincere, devout veteran of the Iraqi war, or a person who was involved in a tragic automobile accident.
Now create a prayer circle [who will] pray to God to restore the amputated legs of this deserving person. … If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch.
What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once—he says it many times in many ways in the Bible.
And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen.
No matter how many people pray. No matter how sincere those people are. No matter how much they believe. No matter how devout and deserving the recipient. Nothing will happen. The legs will not regenerate. Prayer does not restore the severed limbs of amputees.

Seems reasonable enough, no? One would have thought so. “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer” (Matthew 21:21), “If you ask anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:14), “Ask, and it will be given you” (Matthew 7:7), “Believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24)—Jesus doesn’t beat about the bush. And quite frankly, if you can turn water into wine, raise Lazarus from the dead, and feed 5,000 people with a couple of quids worth from the local chippie, then restoring a pair of amputated legs must be a doddle. Wouldn’t you have thought so? So why no regenerated limbs?

Out of curiosity I did a quick Google search on the string whywontgodhealamputees to see how Christians would respond. Fairly near the top of the list was http://www.questioningchristian.com in which one reads:

it must be outlined that amputees, in fact, can not be “healed”; there is nothing to heal in the first place. A lost limb is a dead limb – it is no longer a part of the body. It is simply not God’s job to regrow lost body parts – it would be as illogical as healing a lost tooth, retrieving lost hairs during a haircut, or banishing demons out of a dead body.

… or raising the dead? or turning H₂0 into CH₃CH₂OH? So why, then, would God’s healing of amputees be so much more “illogical” than that? The page continues:

In a sense, this is similar as to asking why does God not commit suicide, or temporary or permanently abolish the laws of gravity. The existing world and the scientifically documented and observed phenomena therein, and what most of the evolutionists/atheists would call a natural world mainly consisting of pure matter, is in fact, a highly sophisticated and complex designed universe, where the existent laws of physics and biology were created by the Creator as a definite set of rules and limits for all the living and non-living matter in our world. In essense, what some may call ’supernatural’ (ie. an amputated hand re-growing by itself in 24 hour time), as opposed to ‘natural’ (ie. that an amputed hand usually never grows back again), ignores the simple fact that a human hand itself is a miracle, as is the host organism; that the life itself, and the laws of nature are so complex and ordered that it can never be replicated or indeed created by use of human knoweledge alone. In short – our world already is a living miracle – a mystery – bearing all the signs of design, and additionally being the definite creation by God (or whomever/whatever the Designer/Creator must have been). It is therefore obvious, that humans should be cautious being as arrogant as demanding that God should constantly break his own laws, as if they were imperfect because of mere human dissatisfaction and presumed self-righteousness. In reality, we are all bound by the existing physical laws, that simply can not be surpassed by science or “impossible” prayers (ie. preayers that implicitly ask God to violate God’s own fine tuned laws). … We are not in the bussiness of asking God violating his own laws merely to satisfy the ego’s of folks like M. Brain.

Uh-huh (but just read it all again to assure yourself that you really did read what you thought you’d read). So, uhm, miracles (“violating his own laws”) don’t happen after all, then? Shame, though, about the fermented-grape-flavoured CH₃CH₂OH which, I’m sure most of us agree, seems not only a pretty neat trick but also represents a huge financial saving at the wine store.

I can’t help but feel however that Mr Brain (if he is indeed the author) gives a little too much leeway to the opposition. Take a look at his presentation, “How do we know that Christians are delusional?”, below:

The author proceeds by first showing how the claims made by Mormons are so outrageously fantastical that they cannot possibly be true: Mormons are, to the rest of the world, delusional. He then does the same for Islam: the claims made by Islam are so outrageously fantastical that they cannot possibly be true, and consequently Muslims too are, to the rest of the world, delusional. So far so good. Christians will have no difficulties in accepting that Mormons and Muslims (and Hindus and Sikhs and whoever else) are delusional, since they already believe it to be the case. He then goes on to make the same case for Christianity, summing up as follows:

“How do we know that Christians are delusional? Because the Christian story is just like the stories of the Mormons and the Muslims. … If you are a Christian you should now be able to see what is happening. As a Christian you completely reject the Mormon and the Muslim story. Why? Because they are fairy tales and everyone knows it. You know that every other religion is delusion. Now simply recognize the obvious: the Christian religion is exactly the same. All the people inside the Christian ‘bubble’ are just as delusional.”

The Christian response is predictable: of course Mormons and Muslims are deluded (and they’ll in all likelihood make some reference to the Biblical admonishment to ‘beware false prophets’) but everything that Christians believe is true. Why? because it says so in the Bible. (Take my word for it—I’ve had too many doorstep conversations with Jehovah’s Witnesses.)  Can they get away with that? yes, of course they can. For the author (and watch the presentation again if you need to) has been talking about perceptions—”Christians perceive Mormons and Muslims as delusional” and hence anyone who is not a Christian perceives Christians as equally delusional—rather than actualities: “Here is substantive and incontrovertible evidence to support the contention that Christians (along with Mormons and Muslims) are actually delusional”.

One might argue that the author has in effect, for the “true believer”, performed the equivalent of the three cup trick: the glittering prize is concealed under one of the three upturned cups and, they’ll tell you, it ain’t the cups marked ‘Mormon’ and ‘Muslim’.

The fact of the matter (and again I speak from long experience—but I imagine this may well have been your experience too) is in any case that True Believers are impervious to rational argument; the error of the rational atheist is to naively fail to appreciate that fundamental truth. Believers may, however, for a moment be made to feel a little uncomfortable and a tad flustered by being challenged on their own inconsistencies, and that is the moment to go for the kill.

Readings

Dawkins, R. (2006). The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press. ISBN: 0593055489. [Amazon]

Dennett, D.C. (2006) Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. London: Penguin Books Ltd. ISBN: 0141017775. [Amazon]

Harris, S. (2006). The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. London: Free Press. ISBN: 0743268091. [Amazon]

Harris, S. (2007). Letter to a Christian Nation. London: Bantam Press. ISBN: 0593058976. [Amazon]

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This is, as much as anything else, a diary note to myself … but you’re welcome to read it, of course.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking (and a little bit of research and reading) over the past 3 or 4 days (yes, the Easter vacation is mercifully upon us at last) with regard to the ‘Culture and Heritage Informatics’ course I’ve designed and (assuming enough punters have the imagination to sign up for it) will be teaching in the academic year from September.

First, the gripe out of the way: I went back to Elgg (now re-christened Eduspaces) to repurpose it specifically for the above course; spent an hour writing an eloquent first blog; clicked ‘Post’, and found myself staring at an ominously sparse white page telling me that there had been a ’server error’. Had I much hair left, I’d have been tearing it out. I of course did not have the strength of will to spend yet another hour endeavouring to reconstruct my post. Lesson learned: write my posts henceforth in an external text editor, and copy-paste to the blog only when ready to post.

Eduspaces / Elgg still looks brilliant, however, and ideal as part of the suite of tools I plan to use with the ‘Culture and Heritage Informatics’ course. In empowering learners as active participants in a peer-oriented collaborative learning space, it beats the Dickensian Blackboard learning management system hands down, as noted in the following extract from an article in the Curverider blog:

While Elgg is a general social networking framework, it has obtained a large user base within education as it provide an different approach to your top down, institutionally centered content management systems such as Moodle, WebCT and Blackboard; allowing for an open, collaborative space where all users, students and tutors alike, can participate, develop and control their own space.
» http://curverider.co.uk/blog/2007/03/16/presenting-your-activity/

Casey Bisson has been saying pretty much the same thing in a recent podcast. Why, he asks do students who are doggedly unimpressed with Blackboard encourage each other to sign up to Facebook and MySpace? Not just for the fun, it seems: they’re using these more democratic fora as platforms for their collaborative academic work. (And, parenthetically, I can’t wait–but I suppose will have to–to get my hands on Bisson’s WPopac plugin for WordPress.)

The Eduspaces article describes a new ‘presentation plugin’ that “lets users create snapshots of their activity on the social network and present this to interested parties as a coherent package complete with narrative and reflective thought”. Effectively a kind of e-portfolio, the plugin delivers:

a tool that allows students to pick and choose elements of this learning experience, irrespective of the media used, and bring it together in a presentation customised for specific audiences. I n addition, the tool needed to have the facility for tutors and peers to provide commentary on presentation elements both with respect to feedback whilst developing the presentation and also, in terms of tutor comments adding to the learning ‘evidence’ within the presentation.

I’m also looking at the Eduspaces / Elgg Explode widget, “which contains your friends on any network or site. This is a great way to share your network with others regardless of where your friends have their site”. Not much documentation on the web site, and I’ve not yet had the time or opportunity to look at it closer. So this is something I’ll have to blog about at some later time. (But see also my notes below on the Coop.)

There’s a great deal of innovative and exciting thinking going on in the world of e-heritage, much as major projects (I’m thinking of e.g. steve.museum, Flamenco, and Sculpteur), but as much again in the form of museum blogs. Look elsewhere on Attica for a listing. I’ve decided to add blogging to the suite of tools I shall use with students on this course, not simply for collaborative working (in the way it’s used in, for example, Manchester University’s ‘Digital Heritage’ course of the Art Gallery and Museum Studies MA programme) but also as encouragement to students to create and manage their own e-heritage portfolios.

There are some pretty amazing Firefox extensions. Right now, I’m using ScribeFire (previously Performancing; see image, right) to write this blog (and shall be recommending it to students … but memo to myself: although ScribeFire has thus far worked like a dream, I might still be best keeping a saved text version on an external text editor … better safe than sorry). ScribeFire (launched from a small icon in the status bar at the bottom of the browser) opens an extended tinyMCE editor in the lower half of a browser window, with a set of nifty little supplementary tools, that enables one to write one’s blog while at the same time, in the upper half of the browser, cruising web pages. Very handy.

A Firefox / Flock extension I’m really looking forward to is The Coop, a kind of live ‘blogroll’ for browers:

The Coop will let users keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share new and interesting content with one or more of those friends. It will integrate with popular web services, using their existing data feeds as a transport mechanism. Users will see their friends’ faces, and by clicking on them will be able to get a list of that person’s recently added Flickr photos, favourite YouTube videos, tagged websites, composed blog posts, updated Facebook status, etc. If a user wants to share something with a friend, they simply drag that thing onto their friend’s face. When they receive something from a friend, that friend’s face glows to get the user’s attention.

… which, I figure, should assist real-time collaborative work immensely.

Another heritage-related site that has fired me with dizzying ideas this past couple of days is Clioaudio, a podcast in the fields of Archaeology, Classics and History. It’s not the only one of its kind (and site owner Alun Salt acknowledges inspiration from, inter alia, the BBC’s In Our Time history podcast), but it’s impressive and inspirational to see individuals taking the initiative in launching such useful sites.

Finally, there’s a great deal of museum-building going on in SecondLife, so I’ll have to twist Tim Ellis’s arm to persuade him to fork out some Faculty money to upgrade my personal account to a Faculty account.

OK, that’s enough for now.

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