A little Rumanian culture

Two items from Rumania today: news and music. A Rumanian friend told us about the pianist Florin Chilian, whose beautiful song "Zece" ("Ten") I've linked to. And for keeping up with the news, there's the foreign broadcast of Rumania's public television network, TVRi, which functions a bit like the BBC World Service. It broadcasts online for expatriate Rumanians, and I just noticed the news ticker at the bottom of the screen has one line in English. Huh.

The Europeanization of America

Cliff May has an article on Charles Murray's AEI speech on the Europeanization of America, up at NRO. I haven't read it yet, but I read several Corner posts about Murray's speech, and it's gotten me thinking again about something I've had in the back of my head for several years. I've got a copy of I'll Take My Stand, the literary and cultural manifesto of the early 20th century Southern movements known as the Agrarians and Fugitives. It's a great book in general, but there's one essay in particular that's puzzled me for years. Now, without going and looking it up (lazy), I don't remember who wrote it. But the author notes a cultural kinship between Southerners and Europeans, simultaneously contrasting us culturally with the Yankees.

The latter part is obvious and uncontroversial to me. But the former? I've never quite gotten it. Partly, I think, it's that I'm thinking of the mid-late 20th century Western Europe, which had by my time fallen into decay, destroyed any history of individualism, religiosity, or self-reliance, and developed an infantile dependence on the State. All of which are antithetical to Southern culture. So I've had trouble getting into the mind of the author and seeing European life as it might have been in the late 19th century, the immediate background to his experience.

I'll write more on this later, if I think about it. In the meantime, I'm finishing up a research paper and an observing proposal this week.

Screed! Screed! Screed! ...

Lileks finally lets loose in a long-awaited screed.

Continuing the trend on "Lost"

Last week's episode of "Lost" was weird and interesting for a number of reasons. Without giving away spoilers yet, let me say first that we now have the Scotsman's full name: Desmond David Hume.

David Hume. John Locke. Rousseau. Edmund Burke.

Heh, heh, heh! I love it--they've been including the leading political philosophers of the Enlightenment in the cast of the show. I picked up on this early, when a leading character was named John Locke (perhaps my favorite Enlightenment philosopher, outside of Thomas Jefferson), and he was clearly the one advocating the individuals to achieve their best, use the situation to make a fresh start and create civilization out of the state of nature they found themselves in. Then there was the wildwoman in the jungle, Rousseau, who was clearly state-of-nature-girl incarnate. The near-opposite of Locke.

The guys over at The Corner picked up on an Edmund Burke character introduced two episodes back. I missed the name when I watched it, but apparently he was an unsavory character. Shame--the real Burke seems to have been a good and humane guy. And he's considered by many to be the father of English and American-style conservatism. Doesn't seem like "Lost" made any allusions to Burke beyond the name.

Now, on to Hume, which is just tickling me pink:

***SPOILER ALERT***

OK, now you've been warned. The last episode centers on Hume, our Scotsman friend who sacrificed himself in the hatch to save Locke and the others, at the end of the last season. He's since woken up, stark naked, in the jungle, apparently blown out by the explosion that destroyed the hatch but presumably saved the world from the poorly-understood electromagnetic quirkiness going on there.

Ever since he's been back among the living, he's gotten these glimpses of the immediate future. Enough to save people from drowning or set up a lightning rod before the bolt hits. We find out why in this episode. It turns out that when he blew the hatch, he woke up back in civilization, a few years(?) earlier, in his old life. He gets to relive it, but he's occasionally conscious that it's all happened before. He's got vague memories of things that happened, just before they do (again). So he tries to change some of them, without avail.

All of his attempts to change his life, to improve things for himself and others, or for that matter to apparently see the future--all of these come from the fact that he's lived the exact same things before.

Now, here they've done a clever little twist on the actual David Hume's philosophy: Hume was the founder of skepticism as a philosophy. Not "I'm a skeptic--I don't believe in anything," but the idea that "all knowledge is based on experience." He didn't believe that there were natural laws out there to be discovered. You could drop musket balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa all day, measuring their fall times, and finding remarkable consitency. You might think that if you do it exactly the same way again, it will fall at the same rate again (to within measurement errors). Why do you think so? Because you see the trend you've established. There appears to be a law of nature that you're uncovering, and you can...deduce (? I always get deduction and induction mixed up) from it to predict what will happen in other situations.

But Hume thought that you could not make that claim. You can't predict for certain what will happen. Why? Because you don't know anything beyond what you've already experienced. Just because the musket ball fell a certain way a thousand times, you can't say it will do it again the 1,001st time. Maybe it will fall sideways!

So what's the connection with our "Lost" Scotsman? This Hume's knowledge is also based on experience, with the twist that he knows the immediate future because he's reliving it.

Very spooky and interesting.