by Charles on January 11, 2021
[First published on the University of Oxford Practical Ethics blog]
Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate has issued proceedings, complaining that Enola Holmes, a recently released film about Sherlock Holmes’ sister, portrays the great detective as too emotional.
Sherlock Holmes was famously suspicious of emotions. 1 ‘ [L]ove is an emotional thing’, he icily observed, ‘and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. ‘2 “I am a brain’, he told Watson. ‘The rest of me is a mere appendix’.3
I can imagine that many professional scientists and philosophers would feel affronted if they were accused of being emotional animals. Holmes is a model for them. He’s rigorous, empirical, and relies on induction.
But here’s the thing. He’s not actually very good. Mere brains might be good at anticipating the behaviour of mere brains, but they’re not good for much else. In particular Holmes is not a patch on his rival, Chesterton’s Father Brown, a Roman Catholic priest. Gramsci writes that Brown ‘totally defeats Sherlock Holmes, makes him look like a pretentious little boy, shows up his narrowness and pettiness.’ 4 Brown is faster, more efficient, and, for the criminal, deadlier. This is because, not despite, his use of his emotions. [click to continue…]
by Charles on May 21, 2019
I’m an academic at the University of Oxford. At the moment Oxford is full of nervous, be-gowned students doing their exams. They’re all concerned about getting a good degree. But why?
I’m copying below a blog post of mine from a few years back, originally published on the University of Oxford Practical Ethics website. My views haven’t mellowed since it was originally written. Far from it.
Here it is….
Several times this term I’ve staggered out onto Oxford station, cramped and queasy from Cattle Class, and seen packs of sleek suits ooze out of First Class, briefcases in their hands and predatory gleams in their eyes. ‘Let’s go hunting’, one floppy-haired account manager said to his confederates. They climbed into cabs, which they saw as safari Land Rovers heading to the bush, and went off to a panelled room in some college. [click to continue…]
by Charles on April 4, 2019
The Dark Mountain Manifesto has been formative for me. It seems churlish – indeed nearly patricidal – to criticise it. But I’ve lived with it now for long enough to see it more clearly than I did, and I am uneasy now about some of it.
It is not Kingsnorth’s and Hine’s delight in apocalypse that troubles me. That is a matter of taste and, probably, nerve. I simply don’t have their courage. I can’t bear to look sufficiently hard at the future to describe it as explicitly as they do. Nor is it their despair. That is a matter of judgment (and theirs is probably better than mine) and temperament. It is, rather, their identification of friends and enemies.
There are, if one is to believe the Manifesto, precious few friends. That, indeed, is part of the Manifesto’s and the movement’s appeal. We are the Faithful (or, better, Faithless) Remnant: the Chosen Few – Chosen because we have remained un-chosen by the Machine on account of our empathy, our independence, our unkempt hair, and the smell of wood-smoke clinging to our jumpers: the clear-sighted, undeluded elite, unseduced by the blandishments of hope or comfort: the seeds from which new life will spring when the fire is out. It’s all very flattering. That’s the only sort of club I want to join. [click to continue…]
by Charles on January 10, 2019
I recently presented a programme for BBC Radio 4 entitled ‘Tooth and Claw’. A link to the programme is here It made it onto ‘Pick of the Week’.
It was brilliantly produced by Michael Umney, and a joy to make.
It examines a conundrum that has long interested me: how can someone with a clairvoyant rapport with nature also enjoy killing things?
by Charles on December 7, 2018
Interview by Cal Flyn (re-posted from https://fivebooks.com )
There has been a rash of books about epiphanic incursions into wilderness—but the best nature writing digs too into the complexities of our relationship with the natural world, says Charles Foster, the bestselling author of Being A Beast. Here, he discusses the best nature books of 2018.
Last time we spoke, you said the shelves were “groaning” with nature books. Is the genre still thriving?
Well, there are many new titles. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the genre is thriving. Commercial success is rarely a good index of worth. But in fact I think that nature writing is in an increasingly good place—or at least is doing what it should be doing. There’s an increasing acknowledgment that the natural world isn’t all romance and beauty—that the beauty is generated by the sinister Darwinian engine, fuelled by pain, waste, and competition. We see people acknowledging that trees and mountains won’t generate a completely predictable epiphany. That’s very welcome.
There have been lots of breathless accounts of how people’s lives have been transformed by walking into a wood. It’s not really like that, and some of the books we’re about to discuss redress the imbalance created by the breathless transcendentalism that has, I think, characterised the last five to ten years of British nature writing. [click to continue…]
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