Just a few.

• Brainteaser.  There’s a worked solution to the one in my June Diary here. 

• Trouble with X.  In the intro for my July 5th podcast I noted an issue I was having with X. I asked listeners for help.

Several listeners responded, for which many thanks. Before I could try out their remedies, however, the Derb family’s Tech Support (i.e., our son Danny) dropped by. In ten minutes at the console, he had resolved the issue. Thanks, Son.

I had been trying to get help from X support, with no success at all. Unhelpful? They were anti-helpful. Eventually they terminated our exchanges with this.

In the business and legal worlds, back when I worked in them, that was known as an FU letter.  Perhaps it still is.

Adding insult to injury, they then sent me one of those ”How did we do?” emails asking me to evaluate the quality of support I had received. I graded them zero on every category.
 
• Pieces of Tibet.  My June 28th podcast included an item about China’s claim to Tibet.   A reader of the transcript—not mainland-Chinese—emailed in to wonder, with supporting maps, ”why nobody ask India to get out of South Tibet?”

• Denying human nature.  A reader of my June Diary passed a penetrating comment on my mini-review of Lionel Shriver’s recent novel Mania.

Here is his comment in full, reproduced with his permission.

Dear Mr. Derbyshire,

In your most recent Monthly Diary, reviewing Lionel Shriver’s book Mania, you state, ”The Mania catastrophe is brought about by one of those egalitarian hysterias to which the Western world, perhaps especially the English-speaking part of it, is susceptible. We— Western Man—have a peculiar relationship to human nature. Great numbers of us detest it and fiercely deny key aspects of it. Those numbers are great enough that they can impose their denials as imperatives on all of society.”

While I do not disagree with you that great numbers of Westerners detest human nature, I would, however, posit that the detestation in question is, in part, a cause of Western civilization’s success. 

As you yourself have stated, ”The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.” 

Western civilization owes a great deal to a continued war against those four modes of thinking; in that regard, Western achievements like science or democracy are in fact profoundly counter to human nature. 

I suspect that the radical antinomians who now command the high points of our culture are a kind of epiphenomenon, a socio-psychological spillover from the more healthy skepticism of human nature that has typified Western civilization for most of its existence. 

The problem is that we have overbalanced, and can no longer keep in our heads two thoughts at once: that human nature is to be striven against relentlessly, lest we return to the caves; and that human nature is a court against which there is no appeal. The first, if unrestrained, leads to revolutionary utopianism, the second to fatalistic ennui. Our inability to countenance that both are simultaneously true is a product of the flattening of the modern mind, just one of many that bode exceedingly ill for the future.

All the best,

[Name]

There is truth and wisdom in that, though also grounds for much argument. The Needham Question, for example, is lurking in there somewhere.

I’d be interested to hear other opinions on the matter. Anything equally penetrating will be posted: always anonymously, and only with the writer’s explicit permission.