Happy 4th of July to readers of an American persuasion. You did well to declare independence from Britain – a godforsaken nation-state in the North Atlantic, many of whose people appear to delight in whingeing about how ghastly Americans are. And everything else besides.

From Spiegel Online today:

“Wir sind den Forderungen der Bundesregierung und internationaler Sanktionsinitiativen nachgekommen”

Following massive public outrage and political pressure from the German government, printing firm Giesecke & Devrient has decided to stop supplying Zimbabwe with banknotes.

This is excellent news. But we cease this campaign only when Zimbabwe has a legitimate and representative government, and former president Robert Mugabe and members of the so-called Joint Operations Command take up residence in The Hague.

It comes as no surprise to me to see high-profile resignations from the UK’s Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) following that once noble labour organisation’s degeneration into semi-naked antisemitism and futile gesture politics. I refer to the union leadership’s call for British academics to cut ties with Israeli colleagues. Israel is singled out for punishment by the UCU, while despotic regimes in countries like Sudan, Burma and Zimbabwe are subject to relatively mild criticism.

Today we have the open resignation letter of Keele University ethicist Eve Garrard, who is known to many as a highly articulate defender of Israel. I feel sad that it has come to this, but understand and support Garrard’s action.

Some years ago I was a member of the Association of University Teachers, which later merged with the further and higher education lecturers’ union NATFHE to become the UCU. That action in itself may have sealed the fate of the union. NATFHE was dominated by scheming ultra-leftists, who then joined forces with political allies in the old universities to create a political activist organisation that displays nothing but contempt for its members, yet happily pockets their considerable monthly subscriptions.

Shame on the UCU leaders; they are a disgrace to trades unionism.

Following my critique of Lawrence Krauss’ scientistic views on the mythical imagination, Mainz University literature scholar Anja Müller-Wood discusses the value of storytelling in terms of evolutionary psychology.

And if that’s not enough, in this week’s New Scientist is a short article by Toronto University cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley on the benefits to the individual of reading fiction.

“Fiction is a simulation that runs on the software of our minds… If I am correct, then just as pilots improve when they spend time in a flight simulator, so people’s social skills should improve when they spend time reading fiction.”

For the majority who have no religion, storytelling is one of the primary conveyers of moral truths. Fiction should be seen as indispensible to our personal development, and not as antithetical to reason and an impediment to progress.

I have just sent the following letter to senior management of the German printing firm Giesecke & Devrient, which prints Zimbabwe’s banknotes. The text is based on that of John Carter Wood, and links have been included for your benefit.

To:

Dr Karsten Ottenberg: karsten.ottenberg@gi-de.com
Dr Peter Zattler: peter.zattler@gi-de.com
Dr Walter Schlebusch: walter.schlebusch@gi-de.com
Dr Peter Mihatsch: peter.mihatsch@gi-de.com
Mr Michael Kuemmerle: michael.kuemmerle@gi-de.com

Dear Drs Ottenberg, Zattler, Schlebusch and Mihatsch, and Mr Kuemmerle

According to a recent online article in Der Spiegel (“Deutsche Firma soll kein Banknotenpapier mehr liefern”, 27 June 2008), federal development minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul has written to your company to request that it cease deliveries of banknotes to Zimbabwe.

The Spiegel article reports a spokesperson for Giesecke & Devrient as saying that the company is “reconsidering” its relationship with Zimbabwe (“Wir müssen die Lage neu bewerten”).

This is encouraging, and I write to ask that your company suspend its contract with the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe with immediate effect. Few in the international community recognise the legitimacy of the Zimbabwean government, and it would surely damage your company’s interests, and Germany’s reputation, if you were to continue in a lucrative business relationship with a murderous regime.

In an article published on 2 March 2008 in the London-based Sunday Times newspaper (“Planeloads of cash prop up Mugabe”), a Zimbabwean banker is quoted as saying that Giesecke & Devrient is bankrolling the regime: “These notes are being used to buy votes, to purchase foreign exchange to import electricity and vehicles to keep their regime going, and to fund the import of Chinese water cannons and police equipment to keep us intimidated.”

Giesecke & Devrient has previously said that the company deals with central banks rather than governments, and that the transactions are made in accordance with World Bank rules. That would be true if the central bank in Harare were independent of government. But this is clearly not the case.

I understand that Dr Wieczorek-Zeul has the full backing of the federal government for her recent comments about Giesecke & Devrient. While the government has no legal authority to force you to suspend operations in Zimbabwe, it has taken a moral lead which I urge you to follow.

Yours sincerely,
Dr Francis Sedgemore

In pre-liberation Iraq, the national football side had to answer to the dictator’s son Uday Hussein. When the team lost, Uday’s idea of motivational practice included torture.

In today’s Germany, footballers answer to the country’s prime minister, Frau Doktor Angela Merkel. If the team loses tonight’s Euro 2008 final with Spain, then its members are assured of a jolly good talking to by the Bundeskanzler. Merkel will not be pleased.

But, tough nut though Merkel is, a few cross words will be as far as it goes.

Anyway, Brit though I be in terms of travel documents if little else, tribal loyalty and maternal genetic lineage dictate that I cheer on the Germans this evening as they and their Iberian opponents kick an inflated latex bladder around an Austrian field.

Post-match update

Never mind lads. But if I were you I wouldn’t try fleeing to Britland; the government and people here are not particularly sympathetic to asylum seekers.

In a recent column in New Scientist magazine, physicist Lawrence Krauss argues with those who claim that the scientific world view disenchants the universe.

Krauss is absolutely right to challenge this highly offensive critique of reason, and his appeal to the natural wondrousness of the cosmos shows how creative and imaginative the naturalistic mindset can be. The atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins has also commented in similar fashion, though it is easy to overlook the more poetic passages in his writings, lost as they are in the relentless and all-too-necessary attacks on organised religion and superstition in general.

But Krauss makes a serious mistake in generalising his critique of religious thinking to an attack on myth as a whole. If I’ve understood him correctly, Krauss has failed to understand the nature of the mythical imagination, and how this connects with the social, economic and class-based nature of religious ideology.

“If this poetry of nature does not change the way we view our place in the universe, providing not mere facts but new meaning, then we are truly spiritually bereft. Yet too many people feel that they must invent alternative realities to justify human existence.”

I cannot argue with Krauss’ first sentence above, but there is something seriously wrong with the second. People very often create alternative realities as informal, loose-fitting mental models to help them make sense of their existence and experience of the world around them. They are not necessarily about justifying existence.

Among educated and relatively free peoples, such “alternative realities” are more often than not fictional narratives that serve to unlock the poetic imagination. And in the modern age they are almost universally understood to contain metaphorical rather than literal truths. They need not, as Krauss claims, detract from the “real-world thinking” required to solve “real-world problems”.

I say that Krauss has failed to understand the dynamic that turns mythical imagination into religion, but he did in his essay make brief reference to Barack Obama’s statement that some people turn to religion for refuge from the inequalities that abound in modern America. Krauss would do well to explore this further, and contemplate the nature and persistence of religion as a means of social control. Religion – whether it be militant Islam or tea and biscuits Anglicanism – is intimately entwined with political ideology.

Karl Marx wrote that to call on people to give up their illusions is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. It is not enough to argue against religion from an epistemological perspective, as Lawrence Krauss and other promoters of scientism appear to be doing.

I only have access to the abstract and a brief write-up in New Scientist, but this paper in the journal Animal Cognition has caught my attention:

“Harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) can steer by the stars”

It has long been known that cetaceans and certain other sea mammals occasionally pop their heads out of the water to survey the surroundings. Does this mean that the animals can use a starry night sky to find their way around?

Apparently so, says a group of marine biologists led by Björn Mauck at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. Mauck and his colleagues studied the behaviour of harbour seals (common seals) in a specially built pool covered with a dome onto which was projected a simulation of the northern sky. The researchers found that even when the artificial sky was rotated at random, the seals could home in with very high accuracy on a particular star defined with a laser pointer.

“Seals and many other animals are exposed to the starry sky every clear night, and thus certainly have sufficient opportunities to learn the patterns of stars,” says Mauck.

Actually, they have far more opportunities than most human beings, living as the latter do in urban areas with light pollution blocking out all but the brightest stars and planets.

To me the result of this study is not at all surprising, but still I feel a sense of wow! at having the stellar navigation hypothesis confirmed in this way. It would be interesting to see a larger scale study of other intelligent sea creatures such as migrating whales and their stellar navigation techniques. Just how this could be done I have absolutely no idea.

Sixty-six English pence would buy me a small loaf of bread, a couple of chocolate bars or just over half a litre of petrol for my car. It is also, as it happens, what Queen Brenda and her dysfunctional family cost me and every other UK taxpayer in the previous financial year.

It is 66 pence too much.

According to Republic – the campaign for an elected head of state in the UK – the £40m total figure for last year included an average cost of £46,000 per train journey, £138,000 for Pip the Greek’s visit to the US, and £18,900 for a night out by the so-called Prince of Wales as part of his ‘The Pub is the Hub’ campaign. Then there is the £415,000 bill for Brenda’s five-day visit to the US.

Yes, I know that one could trot out similar figures for government ministers and other politicians. And some of the expense may have been wasteful. The difference is that politicians serve an at least partly legitimate purpose.

The philosopher AC Grayling is up to his usual polemical tricks in a Comment is Free article published today. It must be months since I last cited that august forum, and today it’s only happening as Norman Geras has taken objection to Grayling’s mode of argument.

In his article, which is ostensibly about “faith schools”, Grayling has a go at religious believers in general. Nothing new there, you may be thinking. But what is original is the author’s use of the neologism “anousics” to denote individuals who believe in ghosts, alien visitations, the dead coming to life, magic, rituals, incantations, strange psychological observances and sexual perversions, weird ancient myths, personified forms of evil and malevolence, and more.

Norm is right to question Grayling’s style and syntax, and his demonisation of all religious believers through an implied association with the stuff and nonsense listed above.

So is this just knockabout stuff, as Norm asks? Actually, it’s Comment is Free, and Grayling is merely adhering to a set of unwritten editorial guidelines understood by all those who write for the Guardian website. Grayling now has this nailed, and I kind of admire him for it.

If he were able to program a computer, Grayling could I’m sure generate code that spews this stuff out to order. And it might then be worth the paltry £75 a pop the Guardian pays those it pays at all (contrary to its freelance agreement with the National Union of Journalists).

Norm refers to honour, truth and logic. But he knows full well that there is little or no honour in Comment is Free, let alone truth. As for its internal logic, this is, shall we say, very special.