LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

PRINT EDITION CONTENTS past issues

PAST GALLERIES

In the latest issue, we published letters on crowd mentality, handwriting, Kurt Tucholsky, knitting terms and Mexico's underground lakes, plus a couple of wise-guy remarks ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, January/February 2012

GROUP THINK
Re: Crowds R Us (Intelligence, November/December)

Ian Leslie’s overall point about crowd mentality is well made but it seems one-sided to charge Gustave Le Bon with “prejudice” because “when he saw a crowd he smelt only trouble” and “subhuman” behaviour. Le Bon mostly studied violent crowds, but his view was more nuanced than Leslie suggests. “Without a doubt criminal crowds exist,” Le Bon wrote, “but virtuous and heroic crowds, and crowds of many other kinds, are also to be met with…The mental constitution of crowds is not to be learnt merely by a study of their crimes, any more than that of an individual by a mere description of his vices.”
Robert Prechter, Socionomics Institute, Gainesville, Georgia

What worries us about an angry crowd is that its members are all annoyed about the same thing. Anger is always “righteous”, so members of the group regard themselves as having a morally justified cause. If the least inhibited among them turn violent, the rest tend to regard the violence as the right thing to do, and many join in. Nothing suspends disbelief more effectively than moral indignation.
Jeremy Bowman

If you are controlled by a tyrant, what other option do you have but to protest as a crowd? Tyrants are unlikely to listen to the individual unless the individual supports them. To protest as a group might be messy, but it’ll also be quicker.
Kelvin Watson, Birmingham

Ian Leslie referred in his piece to the 7/7 bombings in London, but I don’t see what they have to do with crowd behaviour. A train full of passengers is hardly a “crowd”. They don’t interact; in fact they do their best to pretend they’re alone. And when disaster strikes, such a collection of people acts on individual impulse, not because of crowd mentality.
Soros Soria

THE WRITING ON THE WALL
Re: Handwriting: an elegy (Features, November/December)

I very much enjoyed the fact that your elegy to handwriting was written by the obituaries editor of The Economist. However, I am no sadder to see the death of handwriting than to see the passing of horse-drawn carriages. Life goes on.
Chris Glennie, Buckinghamshire

Everyone used to be expected to write by hand. I hate to think that its elegance and grace will be a thing of the past. In my career as an advertising art director, writing, like sketching, is a means of visual thinking. But it’s losing out to computer illustration programs. My kingdom for a piece of paper and a pencil.
Ann Trainor Domingue, New Hampshire

When we write on computers our minds tend to drift, because our senses are stimulated far more than our creativity. There is a single-minded application to the task at hand when scribbling on paper. As Henry Ward Beecher said, “the pen is the tongue of the hand—a silent nurturer of words for the eye”.
Tim Lee

A KNOWN UNKNOWN
Re: Herr Goose-Pimples (Culture, September/October)

I was surprised that Irving Wardle felt he had unearthed an “unknown German author” when he discovered Kurt Tucholsky. In fact, in Germany (and to a lesser extent in Sweden and France), Tucholsky enjoys outstanding, even heroic, fame both in the literary and political worlds. Countless schools, streets, libraries and literary prizes have been named after him, and his works are part of the school reading canon. Anyone interested in German culture will necessarily run into him sooner rather than later. So “discovering” Tucholsky is a bit like, say, presenting George Bernard Shaw to the public as a rare literary find.
Christoph Raethke, Berlin

A QUICK NEEDLE
Re: String of perls (The Mission, November/December)

As a passionate and unapologetic knitter, I enjoyed Will Smith’s account of learning the craft. But one of the first things he should have learned is that the stitch referred to in the title is written “purl”. “Perl” is a programming language. It looks like you might have dropped a stitch.
Tanya Ott

WHAT LIES BENEATH
Re: A watery underworld (Places, November/December)

Tom Wainwright ought to know that the spectacular blue water of many of the Yucatán peninsula’s beautiful cenotes contains breathtakingly high levels of industrial and agricultural contaminants. There is reliable local knowledge about which cenotes are pure and which are hazardous. Before taking a dip, it’s always worth asking whether, for example, there’s a pig farm nearby or a large number of car-repair shops. Were tourists to start making a point of asking these questions, municipal and state governments might take more of an interest in the conservation and protection of these ecologically vulnerable attractions.
Hugo De Toronja

CANADIAN CAPERS
Re: The Line of Beauty (Style, November/December)

Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister from 1968 to 1979, wore a cape to a Canadian football game in the 1970s. He was audacious, confident and flamboyant, a real leader who changed the face of our country – characteristics, I believe, required to pull off wearing a cape.
Natasha Huyer

THE MAKER'S MARQUE
Re: Snapshot (Places, November/December)

Just a little wise-guy remark: the car in the photograph of Tuva, Russia, is not a Lada but a Saporoshez.
Gerhard Lehrke, Berlin

NICE BACKHAND

I bought Intelligent Life [instead of Front magazine] because I prefer to be thought of as a twat by those around me than a wanker. And because it’s brilliant.
Neil Bennett, London (on Twitter)

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