Severian

Wolff sat wrapped in fuligin, the heavy blade of his profession once more in his hands. By midday, the news had escaped, and what he knew no longer mattered so much as a weapon in his hand.

The Grand Inquisitor had been tracked down, and the lictors and pursuivants had hunted him into his deep earth. Now the former Master of the Darkness stood enchained by negative light, and reinforced legations bound him to an iron post.

And the Autarch had sent word that the sword of Wolff's forefathers was needed once again. "We have scotched the snake, not killed it," was one cryptic phrase.

Wolff pondered it deeply. He had little to say, except that the new leadership of the Citadel should possess character first, then competence, and also culture. He had seen too much that was... nekulturnyĭ, or perhaps varvarskiĭ, as his friend the Rock had once said, without much irony.

He looked at those who now claimed the places around the Black Table. He saw insecurities and incompetencies. He saw the ruin of the past and the erosion of the future. He saw people unprepared to think.

To his surprise, it was this last vision that angered him the most. Where there is lack of thought, there is thoughtless faith. Faith is more worthwhile when the one who possesses it has retained it even against fierce trials of the intellect. For that was the lesson of the epistles, bound tightly in the flowing Greek of debate and argument, sophistry and casuistry.

He wiped the dust off the long, black, two-handed sword.

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Note: The fictional adventures of Sir Wolff do provide much that is of interest. You can find them linked here. Just ignore the one about earwax. That was an accident.

The Nanny State

It is indeed possible to enjoy life living in a country where anything bad can apparently be remedied by immediate recourse to a legal system that is armed with mighty codices, grimoires and tomes of high complexity. Such a place has many ways of spanking the evildoer for a multitude of crimeless crimes, with long and involved litigation at great expense to the taxpayers.

Such a place would be most of the United States of America. It is one of the few countries in the world that requires people to label anything potentially dangerous (even if this danger is patently obvious) as dangerous. Even then, using a product labelled in this way and inflicting such danger upon yourself still allows you to sue for mental anguish and suchlike.

I'd rather live in Atlantis. Frivolous lawsuits get thrown out really fast. Litigation clears quickly too. Sometimes, the justice system seems much too peremptory, too interested in efficiency. But when you look at it close-up, most justice is quickly and correctly delivered. The only problem is that some people think they are living in a nanny state.

No. Atlanteans should know by now that the priesthood has only one main goal for themselves and one main goal for the country: immortality and prosperity — the main difficulty in this formulation is figuring out which goal is for which entity.

Examining the Examiners

There are simple tests for competency, when it comes to examiners. One of these is the consistency test.

Let's say that you have an examinee who presents a short work, not more than 10 minutes in length. He is examined by examiner A and this examiner gives him 16/20 according to a specific rubric. He is examined by examiner B and that examiner gives him 11/20 according to the same rubric. What can we conclude?

We can conclude that at least one of the following is likely to be true:

• the examiners are inconsistent
• at least one examiner is fraudulent
• at least one examiner is incompetent
• the rubric allows too much subjectivity
• the work presented allows for multiple interpretations

But what can we do about the examinee's situation? How good is his work?

The answer is that we can't tell. We no longer have a point of reference. The system has become incompetent to judge the work presented.

We can only appeal to a known authority who has somehow been certified 'more competent', whether by previous performance or by fiat. This happens in the legal system, in which appeal can normally be made to a higher court.

Recently, though, I came across an interesting example in the education system. Should the system produce a bad result for an examinee, that examinee gets to appeal to higher authority. But there's a wrinkle: he has about a week or so to come up with a NEW presentation.

But that's stupid, since now you don't even have the original presentation to act as a benchmark. You're starting from scratch. It is as if a person on trial in the legal system is considered guilty of X and then appeals, only to be examined in a higher court as to whether he is guilty of Y. Madness, or at the very least, injustice.

Illegal Operations

Over the last 35 months or so, I've become a lot more acquainted with the local penal code than I'd ever thought I would be after I put my dreams of law school away so very long ago. That has relevance to my current research as I look at the motivations and actions of many of the key players. You see, following on from my previous post in which I wrote about the punishment-reward and the altruistic motivations of the human brain, it only remains for me to make the connection between those concepts and the concepts of traditional virtue.

The punishment-reward motivation is dominated by the virtue called justice or fairness; the altruistic motivation is dominated by the virtue called mercy or grace. Each virtue has two faces.

In the former, two manifestations dominate: justice, in which people want everyone to suffer equally as some benchmark, rule or code allows; and fairness, in which people want everyone to suffer proportionally with respect to some other standard or benchmark. These manifestations can result in injustice or unfairness simply because the scale is actually bipolar and extensible in either direction; negative justice (in which not everyone suffers appropriately) is seen as injustice.

The latter also has two manifestations: mercy, in which an appropriate punishment is withheld; and grace, in which an inappropriate reward is given. 'Appropriate' and 'inappropriate' here of course are seen in comparison with the codes or laws implicit in what we have referred to as justice or fairness. In other words, mercy is unjust and grace is unfair, as far as strict legalistic approaches are concerned.

In practice, humans tend to temper one approach with the other. The problem is that as far as humans are concerned, overuse of one approach tends to corrupt the accuracy of the other.

This extends into the realm of explanations which people give for various phenomena. For example, consider the case of a man who has had a narrow escape from death. A justice/fairness explanation would be, "I survived because it would not be just or fair if I died just yet." A mercy/grace explanation would be, "I survived not through any personal virtue and I should be grateful."

In both cases, the man can rightly say that he has in effect a 'second chance'. It would be clear to observers exactly what kind of second chance he thinks he has from the way he behaves. If it is business as usual, then he clearly feels that he has the 'mandate', because of natural justice, to continue in his usual behaviour. If it is a radical change in favour of more qualitative approaches, then he clearly has a bit more of an altruistic approach.

It is of course not as cut and dried as all that. People are a lot more complex, and most of us will not adhere strictly to a code of rules or laws; neither will most of us totally scorn such regulations. Which brings us to the question of what an illegal operation is, given such a human context.

In computer science or mathematics, an illegal operation is one which is either proscribed by definition, or which has no definition at all. In medicine, I suppose an illegal operation would be surgery in which the release papers have not been signed or other conditions have yet to be met. The term 'illegal' can actually mean 'unlawful' as well as 'for which there is no law', unless it is in law, where 'illegal' means 'proscribed by the legal code'. In the more complex human context of occupational interaction, there are comparatively fewer clear-cut cases.

It's interesting though to see that for altruistic institutions, case-by-case illegalities tend to be more common. If the theory is correct, this is because an altruistic institution has to function more on a mercy/grace paradigm than a justice/fairness one. The problem is when the altruistic institution is no longer altruistic, but still retains the counterlegal paradigm. At this point, it become a hotbed of deliberately illegal operations justified by all kinds of wild claims about the greater good.

These last 12 months have been an education in that regard. I've had all kinds of illegal threats and manipulations observed and catalogued, with apparently no end in sight, within my research area. They don't fit into my dissertation, but they might one day fit into some beautiful paper on institutional dynamics.

Godfather II

When I was young, I used to read a true classic of the British New Wave of Science Fiction. It was a tatty little periodical called 2001 A.D.. One of the linchpin characters in that periodical was a lawman (the word is used broadly here) named Judge Dredd. The learned (well, at least skilled with implements of violence) judge was famous for the saying, "There's no justice; there's just us."

Along the way, I learnt the subtleties of shifting the letters in a sentence just a little bit. It's called adjustment for a simple reason; what is just is exactly so ('just so') while what is unjust is not quite right. What is adjusted is made more correct; what is justified is made fully correct.

And so one day, when I came across the phrase 'in justice we trust', it was the work of moments to rearrange it to say, 'injustice, wet rust'. Years later, reading Tim Powers's Dinner at Deviant's Palace, I would come to appreciate this more. Then, I would have thought I had reached the limits of my appreciation.

In the last three years, 2005-07, I have come to understand that the ability to appreciate injustice, irony and idiocy all at once is something you shouldn't take for granted. Occasionally, that rare ability might yet be called upon to serve its time. Perhaps, "There's no service; there's 'serve us'." Or more amusingly, perhaps I have become happy just to watch the show as it goes on, all the while thinking of King Lear, Macbeth and Julius Caesar. All of these are about fatherhood, kingship, and the madness of crowds.

Which brings me to the fact that it's almost the end of the year. Not all the news is bad, silly or peculiar. Some of it is touching, perhaps a little sentimental, perhaps sharing a bit of romance. I remember feeling sad about my godson for a while and thinking of my role as a godfather. Well, I've made contact with him again. He and my god-daughter, lovely young people, are West Coast artistic types through and through, with a liberal and liberating intelligence that I'm happy to admire.

And so it goes; some triumphs, some disasters, and over it all, the sense that the overwatching Spirit does indeed make all things good in time. I look forward to the year ahead. I trust all will be well, and even if not, that it really is. To the young people of the First (you know who you are), and those of the Second who succeed them, I can only think of one wish: "May you have light upon your way sufficient unto the finding of your home."

God bless you all.

Thinking Schools = Learning Nation?

This is probably the hardest thing I have to say to many people I know, so I shall keep it short.

I've decided that students should not have the primary right to free speech or freedom of movement. Yes, they are human rights, almost universally so – go ahead and look it up in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, that document is flawed in that while it assigns rights to 'everyone', it also distinguishes between parents and children (see article 26). It also hedges all this freedom with caveats regarding what can be said (compare article 12 with articles 18 and 19). Articles 27, 28, 29, and 30 all create further hidden clauses which raise legal issues even if we were to claim that we respected the entire Declaration.

This is not new. It has all been said before. What's new is who talks about related issues, when, and why. On 25 June 2007, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered this very interesting majority concurring opinion concerning free speech in schools. In it, he explains why he thinks that students having the right to free speech in schools in unconstitutional despite the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

I agree with him.

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There, now I've decimated my blog readership. Oh well. I will continue if anyone wants me to, but perhaps I have said enough.