One year after the Sichuan earthquake

Today is exactly one year after the Sichuan earthquake which killed 80,000 people. As I was in Shanghai on the anniversary I saw the media coverage first hand. It was a striking and moving experience
Most important of all, of course, rendering minute in scale all psychological reactions, was the overwhelming scale of the disaster. TV was dominated by memorial ceremonies and programmes on the events. They did their job of bringing out its scale professionally.
Despite outward similarities in terms of wreath laying, and a minute's silence, the content of the ceremonies had a significantly different content and atmosphere to similar events in Britain, the US, or Europe - because it is was without religious nonsense and illusions. None of the 'they have gone to a better place', 'God is looking after them' false comfort that distorts and numbs sensibility and diverts attention from the real tasks of what has to be done.
The events in Sichuan therefore came over as vastly more tragic because they were so - with all the suffering starker and more realistic.
The content of the ceremonies therefore equally brought out the responsibilities of society and the state clearly and directly - not to prepare for a future life but to give people a better life in the here and now.
President Hu Jintao's speech and accompanying broadcasts emphasised the role of society to help those, particularly for example children, whose whole lives will affected by this, the need of society to strengthen its ability to deal with and predict natural disasters and other practical issues. The coverage created a sense of the reality that only humanity and nature exist, there is 'no one' outside this, and all each of us sees is a tiny glimpse of how the world will develop which we can only and should only make the absolute most of - and that only society can everyone the opportunity to do so.
The event therefore gave a very illuminating and embryonic insight into the morality of a future and better society. It reaffirmed how humanity's sensibilities are distorted, coarsened and dulled by religion and the unrealism of such ceremonies in the West. Therefore, in addition to being a solemn and serious day, it was a very striking and powerful experience to have witnessed.
But I very deeply wish it had been something other than such a terrible event that gave such an insight and created this impression.

A philosophical formulation of the choices facing the majority of humanity

I'm a Hegelian not a Kantian. I don't believe in the existence of the perfect, I believe in the better.

The choices facing the majority of humanity

The chance to live abroad (8 years in Moscow in the 1990s, three years in Paris in the early 1980s, three months in Frankfurt) and to make many trips abroad (China, India, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, Venezuela and the US) allows one to confirm with one's own eyes what is known theoretically. How remote from the concerns, and choices, of the majority of humanity is the way of thinking about the world that exists among many of the less than one billion people who live in relatively prosperous Western Europe and the US.
In the latter people have the luxury to compare life to some ideal model. That is not the choice for the majority of humanity. They simply have the choice between what is somewhat better or worse.
Consider the choice of someone living in the USSR in June 1941. They had the choice only to fight on the side of Stalin or to fight on the side of Hitler. Anyone in their right mind chose Stalin - and be very glad you were born in a different country.
Or take the women of India and China - who together make up well over a billion people or more than the entire population of Western Europe and the US. If you are a woman in China you will be literate and live seven years longer than a woman in India - who not only lives seven years less but the majority of whom are illiterate. That is a gigantic difference in the quality of life whatever other issues may exist in that society.

Spinoza

Of the 'intellectuals' in history among the one I most admire is Spinoza. A giant of philosophy he was subject to excommunication and vilification in his own lifetime and for decades, even centuries, afterwards. He simply was not deflected, made a living as a lens grinder, and continued to write what he saw as the truth - with amazing intellegence and content. As my personal motto, taken from a member of the Algerian FLN, is 'courage is a much rarer virtue than intelligence' I consider him a model of what should be involved in hunan thought.

Balzac's Pere Goriot

The first serious piece of literature I ever read was Hemmingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls. But it was with the second, Balzac's Pere Goriot, that I hit pay dirt. I had a school vacation job as a ward orderly (hospital assistant) at the time and remember the book absolutely gripped me. I read it in the evening and then had it concealed in the pocket of my work coat and used to sneak into empty rooms in order to read a page.
It ignited a lifelong passion for Balzac. Even now I scan bookshops for a translation of a work of his I have not read - unfortunately his huge vocabulary means I cannot read them in French although I do own them all in the original and it will be one of my unfulfilled ambitions in life to have read everything he wrote.
The next time I had such an experience as with Pere Goriot was when I read Jane Austen. After reading Sense and Sensibility I started to read Pride and Prejudice. I was so gripped I literally couldn't put it down and read it in a single day.
I read Pere Goriot again thirty years later and it gripped me just as much. For me only Tolstoy is a greater novelist than Balzac and Austen remains an abiding passion. But Balzac opened my eyes to the great world of literature.