Helmintholog

• Getcha getcha kulcha here …
  Torrent links to every one of Bergman’s films. Found through the blog of a leader writer on SvD: it’s hard to imagine any British paper’s leader writer doing that, or, indeed, any British cabinet minister setting up a facebook page, as Carl Bildt apparently has. No, I haven’t friended him.

• am reviewing Peter Conrad’s Creation for the Graun. It is like walking across a very large desert paved with mah-johng tiles: paragraph after paragraph, all about the same length, all written in clear and sometimes admirable English; none of them actually going anywhere. Every — Tenth? Fiftieth? — there is a phrase to spark thought. Then the trudgery resumes. There isn’t between the paragraphs a sort of aphoristic gap as in John Gray; just a small blank discontinuity.

I’ve been wanting to read Collapse for ages. It’s perhaps a quarter too long, where he tries to be encyclopaedic; but it has some really first-class, thought-provoking parts, at the end of which I am even more pessimistic than before. Here’s why.

Diamond distinguishes two ways in which societies may overcome their selfish tendencies and manage their environments sustainably. He calls them top-down (where a brutal central authority ensures that everyone behaves well) and bottom up (where a clear perception of common interests, combined with community pressure, keeps exploitaiton within bounds). Examples of top-down environmentalism would be China’s one child policy; bottom-up environmentalism is found in stable pre-industrial societies.

In between, hoever, there are societies of middling complexity and organisation which are unable to take the far-sighted decisions necessary to preserve their environment: the classic example here is Easter Island, but almost any society will do where the collapse has been accompanied by warfare.

In the last century, progressive Westerners have believed in both top-down and bottom-up curbs on selfishness: first in World Government, and then in some form of enlightened self-interest — “why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet”.

But it seems to me that neither has been successful or convincing outside a narrow circle. We are seeing in Iraq, amongst other things, the end of the dream of world government. The bottom-up idea that we will all come together, united by a common interest in saving the planet, is not taken seriously by anoyone who has decisions to make. It may make some progress, but there are lots of things, like existing religions and power structures, that stand in its way. The most likely outcome of such a global bottom-up movement is that it would turn into somehting like the French revolution, where universalist ideas become incarnated in a particular political regime, which then starts wars with all the others, to establish the brotherhood of man.

So we will remain stuck in the middle with each other, where the tragedy of the commons becomes unavoidable.

Went into town yesterday to see the RA summer exhibition: there is an entire wall of David Hockney, quite shockingly bad. Other bad things include a set of three small sculptures showing Jesus crucified on a wooden aeroplane instead of a cross, some Hindu god half concealed under a rusty German WW2 helmet, and a Buddha with a gigantic golden cock and balls rising from between his crossed legs. Guess who is missing? This made a clearer statement than most conceptual art, but it wasn’t one about the courage of the artist or of the organisers.

The photography section was poor, too. The highlight was a very large and exquisitely detailed monochrome print, beautifully composed, with fine tonal balance, which turned out, when you got close enough to touch, to be an oil painting. But the rest of the pictures were a great deal less artistic and thought provoking than — say — the 10,00 most “interesting” shots on Flickr.

There was some very good stuff among the dross, though. A few very lovely prints — and if I had had £500 to spare I would definitely have bought them; three excellent naturalistic oil paintings by an RA I had never heard of: something, in fact, in almost every room. And in the Sackler galleries at the top, there are some wonderful impressionists at the seaside. Courbet, Monet, Manet and Whistler all fantastic there. Well worth seeing while it lasts.