{"id":7774,"date":"2020-09-25T06:52:39","date_gmt":"2020-09-25T06:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7774"},"modified":"2020-09-25T06:52:39","modified_gmt":"2020-09-25T06:52:39","slug":"moral-condescension-david-hume-snow-in-denver-and-a-rossby-wave-of-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2020\/09\/25\/moral-condescension-david-hume-snow-in-denver-and-a-rossby-wave-of-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Moral condescension, David Hume, snow in Denver, and a Rossby wave of books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The very late, very great David Hume has had a mixed time of it recently; his name was disassociated from an undistinguished 1960s building in Edinburgh, but this only happened because the University of Edinburgh gave in to the moral condescension of a handful of activists. \u00a0Maybe Hume has had the better of the exchange as his reputation as an Enlightenment colossus will survive the de-naming, but the University's reputation as a place where responsible people work looks much less secure. \u00a0The confident\u00a0moral condescension (Edward Ball's telling phrase) of the activists \u2013 the arrogance that had they been around when Hume was alive, they'd have behaved differently \u2013 is worryingly commonplace. \u00a0The pretext for this activism was rebarbative views on race on Hume's part, but the motivation of the activists had nothing to do with these, it was all (and always is) about power. \u00a0Edinburgh must be an easy place for bullies like these, as the university is such a push over.<\/p>\n<p>Alex Massie, writing in the Times, suggests that in the calculus of such reckonings with history we might usefully follow the lead of\u00a0Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think tank, who recommends these questions in trying to assess how someone's suddenly problematic views balance against their other contributions to our lives. \u00a0Thus:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What are they accused of?<\/li>\n<li>What are they best known for?<\/li>\n<li>What is their principal achievement?<\/li>\n<li>What is actually being recognised by any memorialisation?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On these terms, Hume remains a towering figure.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, in Denver, the temperature was 34 degrees Celsius on September 7th about 6 degrees above what passes for the norm. \u00a0A day later it was below freezing. \u00a0The culprit was not a bunch of activists but our old friend the jet stream. \u00a0Rossby waves, I read, are pressure systems that influence the jet (and, as is the way with these complex systems, are in their turn influenced by it). \u00a0Apparently, one of these waves broke (think 3-dimentional, high altitude surfing) and spilled polar air over Colorado, Wyoming, etc. \u00a0Climate change related? \u00a0Well, maybe, but will climate change make such wave-breaking more likely? \u00a0You bet.<\/p>\n<p>An odd debate (I quite forget where I saw it) about how best to arrange books on shelves: by genre? \u00a0by subject? \u00a0by author? \u00a0by date? \u00a0I do a bit of all of these at the same time which can be a bit challenging. \u00a0Someone suggested by spine colour which seems perverse; you might use spine thickness as well. \u00a0Mind you, the most satisfying is surely by height as there is nothing more pleasing to the eye than a gentle wave of books along a shelf. \u00a0Think Rossby waves on a flat surface. \u00a0Ahh!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The very late, very great David Hume has had a mixed time of it recently; his name was disassociated from an undistinguished 1960s building in Edinburgh, but this only happened because the University of Edinburgh gave in to the moral...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}