Know your place

For whatever a man imagines that he cannot do, he imagines it necessarily, and by that very imagination he is so disposed that in truth he cannot do what he imagines he cannot do.

For so long as he imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long is he determined not to do it: and consequently, so long it is impossible to him that he should do it.

However, if we pay attention to these things, which depend solely on opinion, we shall be able to conceive that a man should under-estimate himself.

Benedict Spinoza – Ethics

I’ve played around with this quote for years because it gets right to the heart of a key aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy.

By imagination, he means dubious notions and images we absorb from the outside world without having examined them effectively – or even without having examined them at all.

He wrote long before modern ideas of psychological conditioning, but here he is effectively saying that our abilities as well as our thinking can be conditioned by the outside world.

If we absorb the notion that we can’t do something without taking the trouble to analyse why not, then we simply can’t do it and that’s that. Not a particularly remarkable conclusion for our times, but remarkable enough for his I suspect.

Many of us do underestimate ourselves and I suspect we should always try to notice the fact and analyse why it may be so. Was the underestimate fed to us by external circumstances?

Do you know your place?

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Happy New Year!

We were in Army married quarters in a North German village, when this was first screened in June 1963. Since then, it's become a German New Year's Eve ritual. Drink, absent friends, defiant celebration.

Pic: Wikipedia

Although penned in the 1920s by a British author, Lauri Wylie, the skit is said to have been inspired by Prince Albert's step-grandmother, Duchess Sophie Caroline Amalie of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. From 1841 onward, the widowed Duchess celebrated her birthday in the Gotha Winter Palace, surrounded by her four long-dead friends – a publisher, an entrepreneur, a professor - and a colonel, whose part was played by her servant.

Because of post-WWI anti-German sentiment, the scene was transposed to an English country house, but in Wylie’s original script, the names of the protagonists and the food and drinks on the menu remained Germanic.

Thanks to Prince Albert, we now celebrate Christmas German-style, so why not New Year's as well? Prosit Neujahr!

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Society is like the air

This is an interesting quote expressed with Santayana’s inimitable lucidity. He says there is more to social life than gregarious socialising which he sees as an essentially passive activity akin to breathing.

Gregarious sentiment is passive, watchful, expectant, at once powerful and indistinct, troubled and fascinated by things merely possible. It renders solitude terrible without making society particularly delightful.

A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we can reasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishment from an accustomed society is often unbearable.

A creature separated from his group finds all his social instincts bereft of objects and of possible exercise; the sexual, if by chance the sexual be at the time active; the parental, with all its extensions; and the combative, with all its supports.

He is helpless and idle, deprived of all resource and employment. Yet when restored to his tribe, he merely resumes a normal existence. All particular feats and opportunities are still to seek.

Company is not occupation. Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason

I’m sure we’ve all come across highly gregarious people who only appear to want superficial social contact. They may be good company in the right surroundings, but somehow don’t relish anything deeper than good humoured chit-chat.

Perhaps this is where the emptiness of modern politics comes from. The ghastly charade of social empathy which seems so shallow. If Santayana is right, the shallowness may result from a doomed attempt to substitute the forms of gregarious behaviour for the warmth of genuine engagement.

After all, striding to the political lectern in shirt sleeves doesn’t convince anyone. Simply telling it as it is would probably work better. Not only because the shirt sleeves are unconvincing, but as Santayana says - in itself gregarious behaviour is insufficient to live on.

A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we can reasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishment from an accustomed society is often unbearable.

Sounds like a political party conference to me. It isn’t surprising that the vast majority of us seek more genuine social engagement while party membership inevitably declines to a squabbling, anti-social core.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Oxford: the first coffee house

When you're in Oxford, walking down the High towards Magdalen Bridge, you'll pass Queen's College on your left, then the Queen's Lane Coffee House. Stop, and glance to your right at a four-storey building next to the Examination Schools. There's a blue plaque on it, to mark the place where Frank Cooper first sold the famous Oxford Marmalade made by his wife Susan.

But it may have a greater claim to fame, because here, or near here, was England's first recorded coffee house. In his 1691 book about Oxford-educated writers and bishops, Anthony à Wood noted*:

(1650 – p. xix) This yeare Jacob a Jew opened a coffey house at the Angel in the parish of S. Peter in the East, Oxon. and there it was by some, who delighted in noveltie, drank. When he left Oxon. he sold it in Old Southampton buildings in Holborne neare London, and was living there 1671.

(1654 – p. xxiii) Cirques Jobson, a Jew and Jacobite, borne neare Mount-Libanus, sold coffey in Oxon. in an house between Edmund hall and Queen coll. corner.

St Peter's was later deconsecrated and turned into the library of St Edmund Hall (aka "Teddy Hall") Facing it on the south side of the High was a fourteenth-century inn, originally called the Tabard but renamed the Angel when Magdalen College developed it in 1510, and again in the 1660s.The larger left-hand-side part was eventually demolished to build the Examination Schools. The engraving below is from the early nineteenth century, when the licensee was Thomas Gellett.

(Pic source)

One wonders whether the two coffee purveyors were the same person, and whether the enterprise started in a side room of the tavern (which may have been glad of extra revenue during the Puritan Interregnum) and shifted over the road when business took off. If so, then maybe, as the Oxford History site also suggests, the modern Queen's Lane Coffee House is the site of the first dedicated cafe premises in the country.

(Pic source)

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* “ATHENAE OXONIENSES. AN EXACT HISTORY OF ALL THE WRITERS AND BISHOPS WHO HAVE HAD THEIR EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD” (1813 edition, Vol. I – with additions by Philip Bliss). Accessed from https://archive.org/details/athenaeoxoniense01wooduoft on 26.12.2013

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Referism: gives you the hit without the tar

Pic source

By Sackerson

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Abandon success!

Successful people can't be successfully imitated, and successful fund managers are merely a statistical blip. That's Charles Hugh Smith's latest message, and though he is prolific and always thought-provoking, I think this is possibly his most important, because it bears on the happiness of the largest number of people.

CHS quotes Aaron Krowne:

The average man cannot ever hope to win with "investments"(or the world of finance in general), but must be content with savings. Unfortunately, in the absence of sound money, we don't really have "savings" anymore, which is why the whole world has effectively been converted to economic sheep for the slaughter, a kind of "superadvantage" of those who run our economic system.

Speaking as someone who was an IFA for 20 years, I completely agree that the majority of people should and would be satisfied with sound money, expecting no more than what they are willing to save, and no less than that it should preserve its purchasing power. It is one of the outstanding failures (or crimes, even) of the current British Government that one of its first acts was to shut up shop on NS&I Index-Linked Savings Certificates.

But turning to the wider implications of CSH's post, how many people's lives are wasted chasing what DH Lawrence called "the bitch-goddess Success"? Or, not even chasing Her, but being forced to put their immediate happiness and their personal and familial relationships to one side because of the demands of "the job". All those dreams of ultimate glory and happy retirement ruptured by divorce, ill-health etc. We get guff about "work-life balance", but who is allowed to achieve it in any significant sense? What happened to working the 9 to 5, hanging up your hat when you get home and being contented?

I think we should rebel in two ways: personally, by not falling for the con and as my dearest friend used to say, "Always have as much fun as you possibly can"; and collectively, by pressing for economic arrangements that are geared to making it worthwhile to save money, and possible to have time and energy to enjoy our daily lives, now.

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Noam Chomsky on the increase in US political instability

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