Edward Hugh

Who am I?
 
I was once described by my Departmental Professor as a 'thief' for accepting my doctoral grant while continuing to spend my time reading the books and attending the courses that I chose to read and that I chose to attend, the ones that I thought were interesting. In a way I am still doing this, reading what interests me, and writing about what attracts my attention. I think I suffer from what was once called 'an excess of curiousity', the kind that kills cats, you know. The scholastics even regarded this as the nearest thing to an intellectual sin. Philosophy is born of wonder, but an excess of it was thought to be fatal. I do take some consolation, however, in the thought that in an age where internet connectivity puts the generalist right back in business, and bigtime, then the optimal level of healthy curiousity per cubic centimetre of neuronal mass may have just risen, and excessive curiosity might now not be the 'vice' it was once thought to be.
At least, this is how I square things with myself.
The humanist psychologist Erich Fromm wrote quite a lot about 'Having and Being'. I'm definitely on the 'being' side of thinks (indeed I just gave away the last consignment of what used to consitute a lifelong collection of books. Don't worry, they were all found good homes, it's just that I don't believe in leaving things around to accumulate dust). Sartre on the other hand indulged himself with the exploration of the boundaries between being and doing. Again he was (existentially speaking) much more on the 'doing' side of things, (as was his writer friend Albert Camus). But there is doing and doing. The last time I was asked what it was I 'did', I replied rather cantankerously, that I don't do, I think.

WHY AM I ?

Why am I doing these all this internet stuff that is. (More fundamental questions will have to be answered elswhere). The conventional answer would probably be that I hadn't got anything better to do at the time. But I'm sure my friends and family would remind me that that isn't true. Another very good explanation would be that running a blog and updating website pages helps you to order your thoughts, to classify and not lose your ideas. Again, you can share your discoveries - this is a little more difficult since first of all you have to locate the people who might be interested in them, or better said, they have to locate you, but perhaps this amounts to the same thing in the long run.
Deep down I suppose I'm doing this because I've rather stupidly convinced myself that I've got something to say. In particular you'll probably notice I tend to get rather excited about the way the population structure of our planet is in the process of changing. I also happen to hold the opinion that the history of our species is one of continuous migration (right from the very earliest days of our origins African origins). This reality feels rather strange since we tend to think of ourselves as sedentary, spending our time as we do establishing tribes, comunities, nations etc. What we actually do best and most is move, adapt and change. Perhaps this is another example of the lack of conformity between our self-image and our reality. In any event the recent patterns of global migration are not new, they are the continuation of processes that go way, way back. Our identities are changing, and one of my objectives here will be to try and chronicle how this is happening. The bottom line is that these two phenomena, demographic change and global migration are probably going to have important, and undoubtedly unexpected, consequences, and I'm going to try to follow and record them here, on my website and thorugh my weblog.
In my childhood days - I grew up in the UK of the nineteen-fiftees, in the grimy northern and decidedly unromantic city of Liverpool - there was an establishment TV commentator - Richard Dimbelby - who was always wheeled out to talk us through the things which were then thought to be important, and no matter what the occasion there he was (in fact two of his sons seem to have pretty successfully carried on the family tradition). I have always retained my youthful admiration for the masterful and dignified way he did what he did (even though my feelings about the events being commented-on has undoubtedly changed with the changing of the years).
So maybe that's my real ambition in doing all this, to be a sort of Dimbelby voice-over for the process, the self-conscious part of consciousness or whatever. (If I said just plain and simple that I was here to be a witness that would sound rather religious which it isn't meant to be, so let's just wind this up by saying that I like the thought of all this going to its eternal destiny in the hard drives of Brewster Kahle's Wayback Machine).

Edward Hugh escreve aqui:

• RGE European EconMonitor
• Seeking Alpha
• Global Economy Matters
• Demography Matters
• A Fistful of Euros
• India Economy Blog
• El Cafè de la República (Sucursal Putxet)