The Actuarial Post - article and review

The Actuarial Post published an article about the book, along with a marvellous (and, dare I say it, insightful) review by a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. Click here to see it.

The magazine cut Mr McDade’s full review for space reasons. However, I got to see the full text so I posted it on the book’s Facebook page here.

Cycling Active magazine serialising Part 1 of The Jolly Pilgrim

Cycling Active magazine are serialising Part 1 of The Jolly Pilgrim on their website. The version they’ll be posting (in four or five parts) has been abridged (by me) to strip out the philosophy and metaphysics, and stick to the bicycles and lunacy. Click here to see the first part of their serialisation.

Amazon Page

I now have my own page on Amazon. Well exciting. Click here to see it.

Pinterest

My number one hero - as seen on Pinterest

My online media adviser told me to get on Pinterest, so I did. Check it out, you too can say what your favourite books are and who you find inspirational. Click here to see my boards.

And finally …

Slightly off topic. My father served in the Royal Army Ordinance Corps, in Palestine, between 1946 and 1948, and was offended by a recently-broadcast interview conducted by Jeremy Paxman. Father wanted to communicate this to Mr Paxman, so naturally I volunteered to write the letter. Click here for details.

In anticipation of the joys of spring.

Pete Baker
Buy my book

‘Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.’ – P. J. O’Rourke

Also somewhat of a hero of mine

]]> http://thejollypilgrim.org/2012/05/media-update-may-2012/feed/ 0 http://thejollypilgrim.org/2012/04/jeremy-paxman-sarah-agassi-interview-empire-series/ http://thejollypilgrim.org/2012/04/jeremy-paxman-sarah-agassi-interview-empire-series/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:33:16 +0000 Peter Baker http://thejollypilgrim.org/?p=3580 This post is off-topic from this blog’s normal subject matter, for reasons explained below.

Background

My father was a dispatch rider for the Royal Army Ordinance Corps, in Palestine, between 1946 and 1948. During that time a terrorist organisation called Irgun planted a bomb at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which was then the headquarters of the British Army and the Palestine government. It killed 91 people.

One of the perpetrators of the bombing was a lady called Sarah Agassi. On 27 February 2012, an interview with Ms Agassi (conducted by Jeremy Paxman) was aired on BBC1, as part of the series Empire. Mr Paxman conducted the interview in a way that outraged my father (who colloquially referred to Ms Agassi as “that dreadful little terrorist woman”).

Several weeks later, when he visited London, we discussed the interview. We then searched the internet to see if anyone else had approached the BBC to point out that the tone of the conversation between Mr Paxman and Ms Agassi had been innappropriate, but were unable to find anything.

I volunteered to write to Mr Paxman on my father’s behalf. He also asked me to put a copy of the letter on the internet, for the benefit of other British Army veterans stationed in Palestine at the time, who may have had similar feelings.

A link to a video of the Paxman-Agassi interview is at the bottom of this page.

The letter

A PDF copy of the letter can downloaded here: Letter to Jeremy Paxman re Sarah Agassi interview

Notes

Copies of the letter were sent to the producers of Empire at the BBC, to Jeremy Paxman via his agent, Performing Artistes, and to the Royal British Legion. One month later, neither Mr Paxman nor the BBC have responded.

We’re using my blog to host this open copy of the letter so other veterans of the British Mandate in Palestine, or those with an interest in the subject, can comment (below).

Anyone who wishes to contact by father can do so through me at: thejollypilgrim [AT] yahoo [DOT] co [DOT] uk.

Related links

Click here to see relevant the episode of Empire containing the interview with Ms Agassi on BBC iPlayer. The video was not working at the time of posting. Her interview was towards the end, at around 50 minutes.

Click here to see the Wikipedia page dealing with the King David Hotel bombing.

Click here  to see the website providing an overview of British involvement at the time, told from the point of view of its armed forces.

Click here to see the website giving the story of British Mandate in Palestine from 1945 to 1948.

Click here to see Wikipedia page giving the political background to the situation in Palestine at the time.

Good Morning Everybody

I‘ve resolved to keep you informed with media and website updates etc, but from now on I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow account of my movements, and especially my love life (because I keep getting myself in trouble).

From now on I’ll focus my energy on elaborating and clarifying the optimistic, big-picture world view I regard as a level-headed assessment of the modern world, through articles, analysis and shooting my mouth off about a wider range of topics.

Loose ends:

• Following HotHive Book’s demise, I’m set up with a new publisher – SRA Books. The Jolly Pilgrim will remain permanently available in all good book shops and on all major ebook formats.
• Despite dire warnings to the contrary, my right arm made a miraculous recovery. I put this down to a positive mental attitude, constant exercise, healthy eating, plenty of sleep and X-man-like powers of regeneration. My sling was confiscated. Joy.
• I’ll be doing various talks/festivals later this year, as well as the Olympics closing ceremony and four George Michael numbers at Peacefest 2012.
• I got a literary agent – one approached me after reading the book.
• CLICK HERE for why I favour the CE/BCE dating system, over the AC/BC system (people keep asking).

At the bottom of this email are quotes from some of my favourite reviews. Attached is the excerpt (from Part 10) carrying the book’s core message – about not comparing the real world to a fanciful, imaginary one in our heads, but to see ourselves as revolutions in a Gaiaistic circle of life, spinning down the aeons.

Remember: the world you see around you is not defined by an economic rebalancing from west to east, climate change or a clash of civilisations. Those things are just incidents, implicit to a short slice of history, between the invention of agriculture and the human world turning into whatever it’s going to turn into.

And what a world it is.

In peace

Pete Baker
Buy the book

Age of Aquarius_GMXI_The Jolly Pilgrim

“A next-generation travelogue.”
- The Stag (Surrey University)

“A mind-blowing read.”
- Redbrick Travel (The University of Birmingham)

“A truly inspiring book.”
- Xmediaonline

“Reading this book may change the way you think about the world.”
- The Actuarial Post

“An intriguing travelogue – part adventure story, part reflective musings.”
- National Geographic Traveller

“I was enthralled.”
- Leeds Student (University of Leeds)

“A crazy cycle trip across Europe resulted in a grand exploration of the world.”
- The Essex County Standard

“Suggests a different way of looking at the problems we face today.”
- London Student (University of London)

“A real-life odyssey. A jolly read indeed.”
- Travel Ideas Magazine

Stonking review and interview, in The Stag (University of Surrey) delightful enough to use the phrase ‘next-generation travelogue’

Interview with me, with the young travel journalist from Redbrick Travel who described my book as ‘travel porn’

Great review of the book, in Leeds Student (University of Leeds)

Middling review of the book, in London Student (University of London)

To help: ‘like’ or tweet any of the above links or tell a friend.

With great gladness.

Pete Baker
thejollypilgrim.org

‘Why extremists always focus on women is a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress, they want to control how we act, they want to control everything about us.’ – Hillary Clinton

Somewhere in Wales ...

I’ve been asked to explain (and justify) why I use (and favour) the CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era) dating system, rather than the more traditional AD (Anno Domini, or ‘In the Year of Our Lord’) and BC (‘Before Christ’) system.

First, it’s convenient to date events from a point in the past. The only truly non-arbitrary starting point is the beginning of time (which we don’t know with enough precision and would lead to inconveniently long numbers). We therefore need a red line.

It makes good historical sense to call 1 CE (or AD) the beginning of a ‘Common Era’. It fell during a period when Eurasia was reaching a new level of internal coherence, with the Han and Roman empires representing then-unprecedented political constructs and pan-European trade beginning to flourish. That era division also has the inestimable advantage of already being in use in most of the world’s regions (including: China, Japan, India, Europe, North America and South America).

Nevertheless, while the AD/BC era division point makes good long-term sense, the entire associated Christian nomenclature does not. I’ve written a book arguing (among other things) that extant religious forms are ephemeral and that we need to assess our civilisation over longer timeframes. It would therefore be hypocritical to buy into a dating system which expects people to refer to Jesus Christ as ‘Our Lord’ forever.

The main argument for keeping AD/BC seems to be that such Christian allusions constitute a culturally interesting meme. I urge traditionalists to take solace in the fact that by adopting CE/BCE, our current calendar can not only remain relevant into the distant future, its era division will remain one derived by a sixth-century Balkan monk, popularised by an eight-century English scholar and based on the life of a first-century Middle Eastern holy man/prophet/divine incarnation, whose profound affect on the world will remain embedded in human world systems for some considerable time to come.

The more closely we examine the drift of biological evolution and, especially, the drift human history, the more there seems to be a point to it all. – Robert Wright

- Review of the book, published by Redbrick Travel (University of Birmingham)

- Review of the book, published by Xmediaonline (University of Exeter)

- Article about the book, for the British Humanist Association (BHA)

- Report on a signing, at the Village Bookshop in Woodford (north London)

I’ll be appearing at the following festivals, later this year, to discuss The Jolly Pilgrim.

The Middlesbrough Literature Festival, 19th June 2012
The Secret Garden Party, Cambridgeshire, 19th – 22nd July 2012

To help: ‘like’ any of the above links, request your local library orders a copy, tell a friend.

Interfrastically

Pete Baker
thejollypilgrim.org

‘As I get older, I just prefer to knit.’ – Tracey Ullman

A tricky decision while compiling The Jolly Pilgrim was how hard to go with the final global musings. In particular, the thirteenth: Apotheosis.

In the end, we chose to tone down the original draft (for the book), and post the ‘uncut’ version online at a later date. You can now find it here: Link to original version of GM13: Apotheosis

The ‘uncut’ version is shorter and spikier than the published one, especially the third section inviting readers to consider their view of the universe as that of a ‘hyper-advanced augmentation’, within a mortal soma, thrown up by an immortal line of germ cells – and reflect upon their relationship with death and mortality accordingly.

(If you didn’t fully grasp that, the book can be found here.)

The intention is to decouple one’s conscious, emotional, carbon-based-life-form view of the world (with all its implicit hard-wired preconceptions and constructs) from the broader metaphysical question of: what is actually going on?

In my view, such a decoupling is useful when making sense of technological civilisation. As my collaborator Tom Mansfield put it: if you set aside an anthropomorphic world view (by accepting humanity as just another phenomenon arising from cosmic evolution), the ecological instability inherent to the rise of civilisation constitutes the disruptive period following the emergence of any new complexity (just as the rise of heavy-element chemistry, biology and multi-cellular life were initially disruptive).

This original draft was written in April/May 2008. One experience I enjoyed during that time was discussing these thoughts – particularly those regarding death and mortality – with my late mother, who contributed decisively to their development.

I leave you with my favourite quote of all, which I found scrawled inside a Hungarian train when I was nineteen.

If it is meaninglessness that awaits us, let us live so as to make that an unjust fate – Unknown

This was my and Tom’s first attempt to set out our proposed cosmic and optimistic narrative. An extract:

“The world you see around you is not defined by some grand struggle between America and Russia, India and China or radical Islam and modernity. Its fundamental patterns are not described by a clash of civilisations, global warming or a rebalancing from west to east.

Those things are just incidents. They are the twists and turns in a story of which economic crises, pandemics, wars, natural disasters, ideological disagreements and climate change are inevitable and implicit parts.

The human race, human civilisation and every aspect of the human world are the fine detail of a larger process – temporary phenomena thrown up by a 4.6-billion-year-old planet, with a 3-billion-year-old ecosphere.”

Buy the book

This was the video designed for and shown at the book launch in July 2011.

It’s very useful when people attack the basic positions set out in The Jolly Pilgrim.

Those are:

• humanity is far better off than is generally assumed;
• technological civilisation is a natural and inevitable extension of Earth’s ecosphere, not an existential threat to it;
• the critical issues humanity now faces represent a limited window in history, while we figure out how to run a civilisation on a planet;
• our future is bright, open-ended and holds out the possibility of an ever more interesting world; and
• everyone should therefore cheer up and revel in how gloriously meaningful life is.

Based on the feedback I’ve had thus far (and bear in mind that I’m interpreting my critics thoughts), there are two basic counterarguments.

Counterargument 1: Civilisations always fall

Civilisations inevitably fall in the end. The implication is that our ‘civilisation’ will do the same. The most commonly cited example is the fall of the Roman Empire after the third century CE.

Chan Chan, fallen Peruvian civilisation

In my view, that is a false analogy, based on a limited definition of the word ‘civilisation’. I don’t accept, for example, that we’re a separate ‘civilisation’ from the Romans.

This human project, that we are all caught up in, involves sub-groups of humans going through periods of being particularly organised, self-confident, assertive, materially rich and dominant over other sub-groups. It’s happened with the Han, Ottomans, Hitites, Gupta, Aztecs and numerous others. None of those periods was, or is, perpetual.

For it to be otherwise would have involved some coherent political unit being set up at the dawn of technological civilisation (say, an unending Sumerian empire) and to be ongoing to the present day. But that’s not in keeping with the nature of the process of creative destruction and dynastic survival of the fittest which characterises progress of evolved hominids on a rock over long time frames. We are the same civilisation as the Romans (and the Han, etc.), just a different phase of a story with lots of twists and turns.

One thing I learned from history books is how relentless human progress has been for the past 5,000 years, even during apparent ‘dark ages’. ‘Civilisations’ don’t wink in and out of existence (although it may sometimes feel like that to the sub-players). They’re shaped by the achievements and experiences of the ones that came before them, leading to: a long accumulation of ideas and technologies, ever greater opportunities for non-zero-sum interactions and greater interconnectedness between peoples.

That human project is not fundamentally circular, it is linear and cumulative. The stand-out difference today is how coherently global it is becoming. Within 100 years (given the way things are going), it will be almost fully global as, for example, the regions of Sub-Saharan Africa most caught out by the imposition of the modern world carve out their niche within it.

Counterargument 2: Civilisation is too difficult to be open-ended

The second counterargument is that: the set of problems we now perceive (critically environmental degradation/the energy crisis) are such that humanity will not ultimately be able to surmount them. Or – put more widely – human civilisation is so big and complicated, and the number of issues it must confront so numerous, that something will inevitably stop it in its tracks.

This is obviously an open question, as no one can see into the future. It’s true that we face many novel challenges, and it’s difficult to see, right now, how we’ll get through them all.

I urge people to look on the bright side. To paraphrase Steven Pinker, not long ago our ancestors were infested with lice and parasites, lived above cellars piled with their own faeces, ate bland and monotonous diets, lacked serious medicine, laboured from sunrise to sunset, and spent the winter months in snowbound farmsteads racked by hunger, loneliness and gnawing hunger. They rarely travelled more than a few miles from their place of birth; were ignorant of the vastness of the cosmos, the prehistory of civilisation and the genealogy of living things; and musical recordings, affordable books, instant news of the world, reproductions of great art and filmed dramas were inconceivable.

What’s more, we face today’s challenges at a time when the world is more enlightened, more rational, more humane and less violent than it has ever been in all of its history; and the various sub-groups are talking to, understanding, and cooperating with, one another as never before. Our resources, self knowledge and analytical prowess in assessing problems are all an order of magnitude beyond where they were just a century ago.

So the question is: What more do you want?

The fact is: following three billion years of increasing intensity, Earth’s biosphere threw up some civilisation-building apes. Now we’re here, we might mess it up. But, then again, we might not. And given that we’re irrational hominids on a rock, with no guide books or magic wands, it’s difficult to envisage how civilisation might plausibly be better tooled-up to deal with the deep environmental, and other, problems it now faces.

The Long Now

I assert that a dispassionate observer assessing our civilisation’s prospects (maybe an alien scientist, via some massive intergalactic telescope) would judge humanity’s current chances for long-term continued progress as much better than they have been during any other of the last 5,000 years.

To my mind, the knife-edge near cataclysm of the Cold War represented a more harrowing bottleneck to the human project than the long haul to environmental sustainability (which was always going to take a long time, and involve a lot of arguing and the development of a host of new technologies, laws and best practices).

Taking the long view, the defining challenges of our current epoch (climate change, the elimination of absolute poverty and geopolitical stability) are not an ultimate set of challenges. They just look that way because people tend to perceive the present crisis as though it were the last, whereas really it’s just the current hump in the road.

In the developed West (where I live) most of the headline domestic news involves agonising over the fact that the current state of play compares unfavourably with one of smooth 2.5-per-cent economic growth. This is hardly the Black Death.

Sometime in the next few decades (or certainly centuries), something really nasty, unexpected and existential will come along to knock us back. Fifty-metre-diameter meteorite events (equivalent to Tunguska) hit the planet about once per millennium. Sooner or later, a major volcanic eruption will degrade world food production for a few years. In my view, we should be laying the groundwork to enable ourselves to deal with that stuff – and contextualising today’s happenings in terms of that larger civilisational narrative – rather than indulging in hyperbole over the economic instability and intergroup political struggles which increasingly supplant the struggle against nature for a better life.

‘The private bankers, politicians, global elite and mass media, are lying to, laughing at, stealing from, brainwashing and destroying you and your family.’ – Placard at Occupy St Paul’s’

‘We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement … where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passion of envy, self-importance and resentment.’ – C. S. Lewis