From the Rachel

Rational Incompetence

2012-01-26T13:17:00.003-05:00

At last, a theoretical explanation for why federal agency heads are so often idiots. In the January 2012 issue of Journal of Theoretical Politics, Jinhee Jo and Lawrence S. Rothenberg provide a fairly simple model that seems to provide some insight.

Of course, the journal is not available if you don't have access to SAGE, but here is the basic idea:

Our analysis provides a rationale and conditions for what we label rational incompetence. Specifically, we present a model in which a President nominates and the Senate approves or rejects an appointee. Besides choosing where in an ideological space a nomination will lie, the President also can determine whether an appointee is competent or not, with lack of competence translating into greater variance over outcomes than is faced with competence. Interestingly, while the political actors are not inherently risk seeking, there is a set of conditions which generate empirical predictions for what Goemans and Fey (2009) label institutionally-induced risk taking, by which it is in both the President’s and the relevant filibuster pivot’s best interests to propose and approve an incompetent administrator in equilibrium. This provides a rationale for incompetence beyond pure loyalty or patronage, and seems roughly in accord with notable contemporary cases of incompetent administration.

And here is their conclusion:

It is intuitive to assume that elected decision makers always want agencies, and therefore those whom they appoint to guide them, to be competent. However, when one considers a separation of powers system, such as that found in the United States, intuition does not necessarily survive more careful analysis.

Rather, we have shown that conditions do exist in which both the chief executive and the Senate will prefer to take a gamble and appoint an incumbent about whom there is less certainty about which policy outcomes they will produce. This risk-taking behavior is induced by the strategic situation in which presidents and legislators find themselves rather than an inherent tendency to be risk-seeking. It is not shocking then that, when something goes terribly wrong at an agency, and a very bad, politically costly, outcome is realized, there is often a seemingly unqualified appointment to place blame on.

If you can get to it, there are some interesting case studies in the article.

Owen Flanagan on Studying the Ancients

2011-11-23T13:10:00.003-05:00

In his new book, The Bodhisattva's Brain, Owen Flanagan 'naturalizes' Buddhism - i.e., sees what's left when you take out stuff like nirvana and karma - and finds that it is a wisdom tradition that could supplement Confucianism and Aristotelianism for the 21st century.

Talking about the book on berfrois, Flanagan adds this crisp statement that works for a lot of academic situations:

Some think that studying ancient wisdom traditions involves anachronism and ethnocentrism. One talks across too much time and one talks and thinks in a manner too biased by one’s own perspective for the inquiry and the reflection to be profitable. Plus, these are old dead people. I say, accept that such inquiry is anachronistic and ethnocentric and get over it. We live in the most exciting multicultural and cosmopolitan times, where people come from numerous different traditions. It is in paying respectful attention to where others are coming from that we can see more clearly how we see and do things, as well as the multifarious ways to do things differently.

Rest of interview at http://www.berfrois.com/2011/11/owen-flanagan-naturalistic-buddhism/.

Where is the Sweet Revolution?

2011-08-29T11:16:00.005-04:00

From Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry story, 'Gedali', translated by Peter Constantine:

“So let’s say we say ‘yes’ to the Revolution. But does that mean that we’re supposed to say ‘no’ to the Sabbath?’” Gedali begins, enmeshing me in the silken cords of his smoky eyes. “Yes to the Revolution! Yes! But the Revolution keeps hiding from Gedali and sending gunfire ahead of itself.”

“The sun cannot enter eyes that are squeezed shut,” I say to the old man, “but we shall rip open those closed eyes!”

“The Pole has closed my eyes,” the old man whispers almost inaudibly. “The Pole, that evil dog! He grabs the Jew and rips out his beard, oy, the hound! But now they are beating him, the evil dog! This is marvelous, this is the Revolution! But then the same man who beat the Pole says to me, ‘Gedali, we are requisitioning your gramophone!’ ‘But gentlemen,’ I tell the Revolution, ‘I love music!’ And what does the Revolution answer me? ‘You don’t know what you love, Gedali! I am going to shoot you, and then you’ll know, and I cannot not shoot, because I am the Revolution!’”

“The Revolution cannot not shoot, Gedali,” I tell the old man, “because it is the Revolution.”

“But my dear Pan! The Pole did shoot, because he is the counterrevolution. And you shoot because you are the Revolution. But Revolution is happiness. And happiness does not like orphans in its house. A good man does good deeds. The Revolution is the good deed done by good men. But good men do not kill. Hence the Revolution is done by bad men. But the Poles are also bad men. Who is going to tell Gedali which is the Revolution and which the counterrevolution? I have studied the Talmud. I love the commentaries of Rashi and the books of Maimonides. And there are also other people in Zhitomir who understand. And so all of us learned men fall to the floor and shout with a single voice, ‘Woe unto us, where is the sweet Revolution?’”

The old man fell silent. And we saw the first star breaking through and meandering along the Milky Way.

An Uncomfortably Familiar Assessment

2011-08-19T12:54:00.000-04:00

I have had plenty of time here to discover two of my capital faults, which have pursued and tormented me all my life. One is that I could never be bothered to learn the mechanical part of anything I wanted to work on or should have worked on. That is why, though I have plenty of natural ability, I have accomplished so little. Either I tried to master it by sheer force of intellect, in which case my success or failure was a matter of chance, or, if I wanted to do something really well and with proper deliberation, I had misgivings and could not finish it. My other fault, which is closely related to the first, is that I have never been prepared to devote as much time to any piece of work as it required. I possess the fortunate gift of being able to think of many things and see their connexions in a short time, but, in consequence, the detailed execution of a work, step by step, irritates and bores me. Now it is high time for me to mend my ways. I am in the land of the Arts; let me study them really thoroughly, so that I may find peace and joy for the rest of my life and be able to go on to something else.

That would be Goethe, from his Italian Journey.

A New Word

2011-08-18T11:13:00.005-04:00

I have been trying to coin a word. Starting from satyagraha, or commitment to truth, which was coined by Gandhi to describe his 'philosophical school', I am proposing the word avidyagraha. Like satyagraha this is a portmanteau, combining the Sanskrit avidya ('ignorance') and agraha ('insistence'). It would be defined as either the act of closing your eyes, putting your fingers in your ears, and going 'lalalalalala!', or the mental equivalent thereof. I've long wanted a word for that.

New words are problematic. Knut Hamson has much to say about this in his novel Hunger:

All at once I snapped my fingers a couple of times and laughed. Hellfire and damnation! I suddenly imagined I had discovered a new word! I sat up in bed, and said: It is not in the language, I have discovered it – Kuboaa. It has letters just like a real word, by sweet Jesus, man, you have discovered a word!... Kuboaa… of tremendous linguistic significance.

The word stood out clearly in front of me in the dark.

I sat with wide eyes astonished at my discovery, laughing with joy. Then I fell to whispering: they could very well be spying on me, and I must act so as to keep my invention secret. I had arrived at the joyful insanity hunger was: I was empty and free of pain, and my thoughts no longer had any check. I debated everything silently with myself. My thoughts took amazing leaps as I tried to establish the meaning of my new word. It needn’t mean either God or the Tivoli Gardens, and who had said it had to mean cattle show? I clenched my fists hard and repeated again: Who said it had to mean cattle show? When I thought it over, it was in fact not even necessary that it mean padlock or sunrise. In a word like that it was very easy to find meaning. I would just wait and see. In the meantime, I would sleep on it.

I lay back on the cot and chuckled, but said nothing, did not commit myself either for or against. Some time went by and I remained excited, the new word plagued me incessantly, kept on returning, finally took control of my thoughts entirely and made me sober down. I had formulated my opinion on what the word did not mean, but I had not yet come to a decision on what it did mean. ‘That is a secondary matter!’ I said aloud to myself, and grabbed myself by the arm and repeated that it was a secondary matter. The word, thanks to God, has been discovered and that was the main thing. But thoughts pestered me constantly and kept me from falling asleep: nothing seemed to me good enough for this remarkable word. Finally I sat up a second time in bed, took my head between both hands, and said, ‘No, no, that is exactly what is impossible – letting it mean emigration or tobacco factory! If it could have meant something like that, I would have made the decision a long time ago and taken the consequences.’ No, the word was actually intended to mean something spiritual, a feeling, a state of mind – if I could only understand it? And I thought and thought to find something spiritual. It occurred to me that someone was talking, butting into my chat, and I answered angrily: ‘I beg your pardon? For an idiot, you are all alone in the field! Yarn? Go to hell!’ Why should I be obligated to let it mean yarn when I had a special aversion to its meaning yarn? I had discovered the word myself, and I was perfectly within my rights to let it mean whatever I wanted it to, for that matter. So far as I knew, I had not yet committed myself….

The Pharmacists' Bastard Literature

2011-08-04T18:21:00.004-04:00

Sir William Osler, Canadian physician and professor at McGill University, came to America in the 1880s, and became one of the founders of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His biography on Wikipedia is quite thorough, so I won’t repeat it here.

In 1902, he gave an address on ‘Chauvinism in Medicine’ to the Canadian Medical Association. It is included in the 1932 collection of his lectures and addresses, Aequanimitas. In it, he makes an observation on the relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies that could have been printed as an op-ed piece today.

[The skeptical attitude] may keep the practitioner out of the clutches of the arch enemy of his professional independence – the pernicious literature of our camp-followers, a literature increasing in bulk, in meretricious attractiveness, and in impudent audacity. To modern pharmacy we owe much, and to pharmaceutical methods we shall owe much more in the future, but the profession has no more insidious foe than the large borderland pharmaceutical houses. No longer an honoured messmate, pharmacy in this form threatens to become a huge parasite, eating the vitals of the body medical. We all know only too well the bastard literature which floods the mail, every page of which illustrates the truth of the axiom, the greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

The emphasis added here is not original, but reproduced from the library copy that I read. This struck me particularly, as the book was apparently donated to the University of New Mexico Library by Harvey A. K. Whitney (1894-1957), who received his Ph.C. degree from the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy in 1923 and went on to found the American Society of Hospital Pharmacists in 1942. Furthermore, glued inside the front cover is a letter dated May 1932, presumably sent generically to newly minted doctors, as the salutation is a simple “Dear Doctor”, reading as follows:

Dear Doctor:

Together with congratulations on your attainment of a medical degree, this volume of addresses by Sir William Osler, who adorned your profession in the United States for so many years, is cordially presented.

As the addresses by this master mind of modern medicine are read, may you catch his vision of the almost boundless possibilities of your chosen profession.

May you share with him his ‘relish of knowledge’ and his absorbing love and passionate, persistent search for truth.

Above all, may there come to you an inspiration which will enable you to live a rich, a happy, and an abundant life.

Sincerely yours,

ELI LILLY AND COMPANY

The letter is signed by Eli Lilly, President. It seems clear to me that this was a promotional gift. Apparently, Osler’s own book became part of the bastard literature flowing from pharmacists to physicians.

Cruel fate.

Balzac on the News

2011-07-21T18:59:00.002-04:00

Honoré de Balzac published Lost Illusions in three parts, from 1837 to 1845. It is a complex novel, with major sections analyzing the corrupt practices of publishers and lawyers, as well as Post-Napoleonic petty nobility. One of the themes that particularly impresses today is the way that the newspapers meld into the petty evils of Parisian society, augmenting and coarsening them. Read in the context of the recent News International scandals, the extreme political blogs, and the limp mainstream media, Balzac's descriptions are downright prescient.

In the second part of the novel, originally published as A Great Man in Embryo (1839), Lucien Chardon foregoes the purity of writing fiction and poetry for the short-term profit of writing for the newspapers. Over dinner with his dancer mistress, Coralie, Lucien hears a savage rant from one of his new journalist friends, Claude Vignon.

Instead of being a priestly function, the newspaper has become a political party weapon; now it is becoming merely a trade; and like all trades it has neither faith nor principles. Every newspaper is, as Blondet says, a shop which sells to the public whatever shades of opinion it wants. If there were a journal for hunchbacks it would prove night and morning how handsome, how good-natured, how necessary hunchbacks are. A journal is no longer concerned to enlighten, but to flatter public opinion. Consequently, in due course, all journals will be treacherous, hypocritical, infamous, mendacious, murderous; they’ll kill ideas, systems and men, and thrive on it. They’ll be in the happy position of all abstract creations: wrong will be done without anybody being guilty. … Napoleon gave the explanation of this phenomenon – moral or immoral, whichever you like – in a superb aphorism dictated to him by his study of the Convention: In corporate crimes no one is implicated. A newspaper can behave in the most atrocious manner and no one on the staff considers that his own hands are soiled.

Vignon continues, looking to the future:

We shall see the newspapers, which originally were run by men of honour, fall subsequently into the hands of the greatest mediocrities possessing the patience and india-rubber faint-heartedness lacking in men of fine genius, or into the hands of grocers with money enough to buy the products of the pen. We can already see this happening! But in ten years’ time any urchin fresh from school will believe he’s a great man; he’ll climb on to the column of a newspaper in order to kick his predecessors in the teeth; he’ll pull their feet from under them in order to get their place.

Summing up:

It’s an incurable sore which will become more and more cancerous, more and more insufferable; and the greater the evil, the more it will be tolerated, until the day comes when, thanks to their abundance, the newspapers will be in a confusion like that of Babel. We know, the whole lot of us, that the papers will go further in ingratitude than kings, further in speculation and calculation than the dirtiest kind of commerce, that they will rot our intelligences by selling us their mental fire-water every morning. But we shall all write for them, like the people who work a quicksilver mine knowing that they’ll die of it.

And that's just the journalists. In Part III, Balzac takes on the lawyers...

The Lesson of Soissons

2011-06-17T12:03:00.002-04:00

Georg Brandes (1842-1927) was a Danish critic and literary scholar, and a salient public intellectual at the start of the century. This remarkable essay is embedded in his 1906 book, On Reading.

After the battle of Leipzig, Napoleon's position was as follows: He had from sixty to seventy thousand men under arms, exhausted, broken-down troops, the majority of them mere children. Opposed to them were three hundred thousand men, hardy and victorious soldiers. His generals were marching into France in disorder. What did Napoleon do? He hastened wherever the danger was greatest, reassured his troops, hurled them against the invading enemy, won a victory at Brienne, at La Rothiere, one to four, sometimes one to five. He dared not assume the offensive against such superior numbers, but, like a beast of prey, crouching ready to spring, he awaited some favorable chance, some mistake, which he was convinced the enemy would yet commit.

The mistake was made; Blücher and Schwarzenberg advanced separately. Napoleon flung himself upon Blücher, defeated him four days in succession, next fell upon Schwarzenberg, put him to flight, rejected offers of peace because the enemy would not concede France her natural boundaries, and hastened after Blücher again, to crush him completely and re-establish his own power.

Then suddenly everything changed. The little fortress of Soissons, which prevented Blücher and Schwarzenberg from combining their forces afresh, surrendered at the decisive moment. "Blucher's defeat," says Thiers, "was as certain as anything in a war can be. For the first time in this campaign not only the strategic, but also the numerical superiority, was on Napoleon's side. . . . What was it that could thus overthrow circumstances and fortune? A weak man, one who without being either a traitor or a coward, or even a poor officer, allowed himself to be terrified by the enemy's threats. Thus was consummated the most baleful event in our history, next to that which occurred the following year between Wavre and Waterloo."

Read the story in the best modern presentment of it, Henri Houssaye's book, "1814."

The fortress of Soissons had always been regarded as an important strategic point. But before 1814 no one had thought of putting it in a state of defence. Who would think of an invasion of France! The outworks were in ruins. Repairs were set on foot, and the command given over to Governor-General Moreau, no relation of the celebrated Moreau. The garrison consisted of a handful of men, seven hundred Poles, broken-hearted because they saw their country's cause lost, but nevertheless unswervingly attached to Napoleon, one hundred and forty gunners of the Old Guard, and eighty cavalry. The place was equipped with twenty light cannon.

There were therefore in all between nine hundred and one thousand men. Outside the fortress stood fifty thousand men, the Russians under Winzingenrode, the Prussians under Blücher, and an artillery corps with forty heavy cannon. The cannonade began on March 2, at 11 o'clock in the morning. By 12 o'clock the gun-carriages had been shot away from several of the fortress cannon, and a number of the men disabled. At 3 o'clock the Russian column made an assault. It was repulsed by three hundred Poles under Colonel Koszynski. That day the little garrison had twenty-three killed and one hundred and twenty-three wounded.

In the meantime the two allied generals could hear a steady cannonade in the direction of Quercq, and were growing uneasy. After twelve hours' bombardment they had still been unable to make a breach. It might possibly require twelve or even thirty-six hours yet, and they had not the time to spare. They were only a day's march in front of Napoleon, and he was following at their heels.

Blücher sent Captain Mertens to parley. Moreau, when he found that Mertens had come to talk of the surrender of the fortress, broke off the discussion; yet, instead of dismissing the captain without more ado, took occasion to mention that he could not enter into oral proposals with an officer who had not brought written authority with him. An hour later Mertens was in the town again with a letter. An energetic commandant would not have received the man with a flag of truce a second time. The condition of the fortress was not desperate. Moreau could have taken advantage of the night to repair the damage he had sustained.

Mertens, however, like a clever diplomatist, exhausted himself in compliments upon the courage of the garrison and the Governor, reminded Moreau of the inadequacy of his own troops and of the strength of the allies, fifty to one. It was a great responsibility, for the sake of a useless resistance, he argued, to expose the town to being taken by storm, and as a result pillaged and burnt. Moreau replied with the sentiment that he would let himself be buried under the ruins of his walls. But Mertens, who read his uncertainty, did not allow himself to be overawed, and represented to him that after honorable capitulation he would be at liberty to join the imperial army.

He appealed to the weak man's sense of duty by saying that in one or two, or three days at most, Soissons would be compelled to surrender in any case; that those of the soldiers who survived the assault would then become prisoners of war, and the inhabitants of the town would be exposed to the horrors of pillage, whereas now the garrison might march out free.

Nothing more was required of Moreau than to obey his original orders. The regulations read: "Make use of every means of defence, be deaf to intelligence communicated by the enemy, and be as proof against his whispers as against his attacks." And further: "The Governor of a fortress must remember that he is defending one of the bulwarks of the Empire, and that his surrender one single day sooner than necessary may be attended with the most important consequences to the defence of the state and the safety of the army."

Moreau had several times shown himself a brave man. Without proof of courage indeed men did not attain to the rank of general under Napoleon. But he was not heroical, and doubtless he regarded the Emperor's cause as lost, as did most of the generals. He did not wish to sacrifice himself needlessly.

He summoned a council of war, at which it was shown that there were still three thousand gun-charges left and two hundred thousand cartridges. In spite of some division of opinion, the desire to continue the defence triumphed. Scarcely, however, had the council dispersed before another officer under a flag of truce arrived with a letter, in which the words "assault," "pillage," and "hew down " occurred with disquieting and terrifying effect. A fresh council of war met, and yielded; the Polish colonel was the only one who advocated resistance, but being a foreigner he had no vote.

Moreau then took the truce-maker aside, and agreed to the capitulation, on condition that the town should have no contribution levied upon it, and that the garrison should be allowed to march out with its arms and baggage. The enemy agreed. The Governor's orders, however, had been: "When the council has been heard, the Governor of a fortress must decide alone and on his own responsibility. He must follow the firmest and most intrepid counsel not absolutely inconsistent with practicability."

Day broke. The constant coming and going of the ambassadors, the cessation of the firing, the frightful stillness, like the silence in a room where some one is dying, made the troops begin to feel uneasy. Were they to lay down their arms after having defended themselves so well? Misgivings increased. Murmurings went through the ranks, the indignation of the inhabitants mingling with that of the soldiers. The words "coward " and "traitor" were linked with Moreau's name.

It was 9 o'clock in the morning. Suddenly the cannonade in the direction of Quercq became deafening. All started at the sound. Then followed an explosion of hope and resentment in the cry: "It is the Emperor's cannon! The Emperor is coming! C’est le canon de l’Empereur!"  the shout that during the whole war had been the signal for fresh courage among the French and terror in the hearts of the enemy. The enemy might stand against Napoleon's generals, but he trembled before the approach of the man himself.

On every side the cry arose: "Tear the capitulation to pieces, the Emperor is coming! The dispute was still unsettled as to how many cannon the French might take with them, two or more. The altercation grew hot. Then General Woronzof said in Russian to Löwenstern: "Let them take all their artillery with them, and mine too, so long as they vacate the fortress and go!"

The document was scarcely signed when the sound of the cannonade was distinctly heard near at hand. Moreau grew pale; he seized Löwenstern by the arm, and cried: "You have tricked me. The firing is coming nearer. It is Blücher who is fleeing. Had I not surrendered the Emperor would have driven Blücher into the Aisne. He will have me shot. I am lost."

Napoleon pardoned him; but there is evidence to show that if the Governor had not capitulated when he did, the enemy would have raised the siege the next day.

There was a saying in France at that time that a man should always fire his last shot, because it might be the one to kill the enemy. Moreau did not fire his last shot. If he had, according to all human calculation, the enemies of France would have been beaten, and the Europe of today might have been different.

I know no story more suggestive, or more profound, than this of the siege of Soissons. I know none more moral.

There is no need to raise the objection that it is exceedingly uncertain whether Napoleon, had he not beaten the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians in 1814, would not still have been ruined by some later combination of circumstances. It is quite as possible that he would have held out. "He had become a different man; he was no longer swayed by ambitious dreams alone. All the greatness in him had been developed as it had never been before.

But even conceding the argument for a moment, the case only becomes greater and more important. We will suppose it thus: If Soissons had been held, Europe would have been spared fifteen years of terrible reaction. The fate of Europe was hanging on a thread. And it was snapped, not by cowardice or treachery, not by terrible privation, in the presence of which all better men are at their post, but by loyal, honorable small-mindedness. In this story we have the psychology of honorable small-mindedness.

You feel it coming, step by step. There are reasons galore for not doing the only thing that ought to be done.

You are eight hundred against fifty thousand. Is that a reason? You have fought bravely the whole day through against tremendous odds. Is that a reason? In any case you can only hold out a very short time. Is that a reason? By remaining firm you are hazarding the welfare of countless human beings; that is, by being small-minded, you may, possibly, probably, save the lives of worthy men. By yielding now you hope to be able to prove yourself a hero another time. As if these were reasons!

This present task is the one you must not shirk. This is the higher command, which must be unconditionally obeyed. This is the will of Caesar, the Caesar unto whom we must all render what is his own. This is Rhodes ; we must dance here. This is the spot in the universe upon which the decision depends.

And none of us can ever know whether the spot whereon we stand may not be such a turning-point, whence interminable threads start in all directions. We do not know. The only thing we do know is that now is the time to be a man, and not a weakling, a Governor, not a capitulant. And if we do not stand firm, if with the greatest respect for the circumstances we yield, and upon the most honorable terms in the world, with drums beating and trumpets sounding, we sign the capitulation, . . . close at hand we shall hear the Emperor's guns thundering loudly, and we shall feel ourselves rejected and lost, worthy of a wretch's death.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Archilochus

2011-06-13T13:55:00.003-04:00

A translation by Guy Davenport from the 1964 collection Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochus. This is #43.

Be bold! That’s one way
Of getting through life.
So I turn upon her
And point out that,
Faced with the wickedness
Of things, she does not shiver.
I prefer to have, after all,
Only what pleases me.
Are you so deep in misery
That you think me fallen?
You say I’m lazy; I’m not,
Nor any of my kin-people.
I know how to love those
Who love me, how to hate.
My enemies I overwhelm
With abuse. The ant bites!
The oracle said to me:
‘Return to the city, reconquer.
It is almost in ruins.
With your spear give it glory.
Reign with absolute power,
The admiration of men.
After this long voyage,
Return to us from Gortyne.’
Pasture, fish, nor vulture
Were you, and I, returned,
Seek an honest woman
Ready to be a good wife.
I would hold your hand,
Would be near you, would have run
All the way to your house.
I cannot. The ship went down,
And all my wealth with it.
The salvagers have no hope.
You whom the soldiers beat,
You who are all but dead,
How the gods love you!
And I, alone in the dark,
I was promised the light.

Unsystematic = Unmemorable?

2011-05-19T17:42:00.000-04:00

Etienne Gilson, From The Spirit of Thomism (1964):

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a German philosopher by the name of Franz Brentano began to wonder how long the chain of the mutually destructive systems of philosophy was going to continue. Kant had just been replaced by Fichte, Fichte by Schelling, Schelling by Hegel, and Hegel by Schopenhauer. Hoping to bring the philosophical merry-go-round to a stop, Brentano suggested as a remedy a general return to the realism of the Greeks. This meant that for us as already for Aristotle, the method of philosophy should be the same as that of the science of nature, to wit, a rational interpretation of observed facts. The result of Brentano’s experiment is conclusive: himself a good psychologist, Brentano left no system to which his name could be attached, so that today he is practically forgotten.

I must confess that I know of no remedy to the difficulty. … Philosophy simply is not the kind of conceptual poetry they call a philosophical ‘system.’ Philosophy is wisdom, and wisdom is not poetry. Neither is it positive science, nor ethics, nor economics, nor politics. A true philosopher may well be neither a scientist nor a successful industrialist, nor a celebrated statesman. When asked to say what he knows, the true philosopher modestly answers with Socrates: nothing. And indeed his own function is not to know any particular kind of things; rather, it is to start from the cognitions gained by other men in the various and changing fields of knowledge and action; it is to clarify these cognitions, to criticize them and to order them by relating them to first causes. Like science, philosophy is about things, not cognitions, yet what is left of science, unless it thus unifies itself in the light of philosophical reflection, is but a heap of uncritical and disjointed pieces of information.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Newman's Undergraduates

2011-05-16T19:24:00.002-04:00

It is seldom remembered that, before his famous The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman wrote a novel. Entitled Loss and Gain, it was about the process by which an Oxford student comes to convert to the Roman Church - a subject of particular interest to Newman. Early on, he describes the state of the undergraduate, embedded in the blooming, buzzing confusion of the university.

When, then, men for the first time look upon the world of politics or religion, all that they find there meets their mind’s eye as a landscape addresses itself for the first time to a person who had just gained his bodily sight. One thing is as far off as another; there is no perspective. The connection of fact with fact, truth with truth, the bearing of fact upon truth, and truth upon fact, what leads to what, what are points primary and what secondary, – all this they have yet to learn. It is all a new science to them, and they do not even know their ignorance of it. Moreover, the world of to-day has no connection in their minds with the world of yesterday; time is not a stream, but stands before them round and full, like the moon. They do not know what happened ten years ago, much less the annals of a century; the past does not live to them in the present; they do not understand the worth of contested points; names have no associations for them, and persons kindle no recollections. They hear of men, and things, and projects, and struggles, and principles; but everything comes and goes like the wind, nothing makes an impression, nothing penetrates, nothing has its place in their minds. They locate nothing: they have no system. They hear and they forget; or they just recollect what they have once heard, they can’t tell where. Thus they have no consistency in their arguments; that is, they argue one way to-day, and not exactly the other way to-morrow, but indirectly the other way, at random. Their lines of argument diverge; nothing comes to a point; there is no one centre in which their minds sits [sic], on which their judgment of men and things proceeds. This is the state of many men all through life; and miserable politicians or Churchmen they make, unless by good luck they are in safe hands, and ruled by others, or are pledged to a course. Else they are at the mercy of the winds and waves; and, without being Radical, Whig, Tory, or Conservative, High Church or Low Church, they do Whig acts, Tory acts, Catholic acts, and heretical acts, as the fit takes them, or as events or parties drive them.

The Original Private Photojournalism

2011-05-14T12:43:00.002-04:00

The Jasmine Revolution has been sustained by photo and video documentation of protests and government attacks on same, thanks to the ubiquitous cell phone. It is interesting to recall when personal photojournalism began, though - at the end of the 19th century. The Kodak camera, first sold in 1888, is credited for the advent of amateur photography. The version with folding bellows appeared soon afterwards, and by 1897, there was a pocket-sized folding Kodak that could go anywhere.

One of its immediate impacts was on the international reaction to the atrocities carried out in the Congo by Leopold II of Belgium. That sad story is well documented in Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, but I want to point out that some of the journalism of the time continues to resonate. In particular, Mark Twain's pamphlet, King Leopold's Soliloquy, speaks of the kind of press engagement - and disengagement - that we still see in modern atrocities of the human, economic, and environmental kinds. Twain reminds the reader that Leopold successfully 'bunco[ed] a Yankee' by convincing the US and President Hayes to be his primary supporter in acquiring the Congo territory. (Belgium had refused to take it on as an imperial acquisition, so Leopold established a holding company and, in the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, won the right to run it as his personal colony.)

When the condemnation of Leopold's bloody exploitation began, he suppressed the coverage by appealing to his American business partners: J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Daniel Guggenheim, and Thomas Fortune Ryan. He also hired American lobbyists, such as Henry I. Kowalsky. (The 'profession' of lobbyist had only recently undergone rapid development, thanks to the Reconstruction Era railroad expansion.) Accounts came out from missionaries and traders, but the newspapers treated them with suspicion.

And then came the Kodak. Twain, whose pamphlet is supposedly King Leopold himself reflecting on his situation, tells of its impact:

The kodak has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy indeed. In the early years we had no trouble in getting the press to ‘expose’ the tales of the mutilations as slanders, lies, inventions of busy-body American missionaries and exasperated foreigners who found the ‘open door’ of the Berlin-Congo charter closed against them when they innocently went out there to trade; and by the press’s help we got the Christian nations everywhere to turn an irritated and unbelieving ear to those tales and say hard things about the tellers of them. Yes, all things went harmoniously and pleasantly in those good days, and I was looked up to as the benefactor of a down-trodden and friendless people. Then all of a sudden came the crash! That is to say, the incorruptible Kodak – and all the harmony went to hell! The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe. Every Yankee missionary and every interrupted trader sent home and got one; and now – oh, well, the pictures get sneaked around everywhere, in spite of all we can do to ferret them out and suppress them. Ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand presses are saying the good word for me all the time and placidly and convincingly denying the mutilations. Then that trivial little Kodak, that a child can carry in its pocket, gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb!

Post-Bin-Ladin Reflection from Thucydides

2011-05-07T14:50:00.004-04:00

In 424 BCE, Hermocrates son of Hermon, a Syracusan, spoke to the assembled Sicilian embassies at Gela, to discuss suing for peace with the Athenians, despite the fact that it was the Athenians who started the fight:

Let him remember that many before now have tried to chastise a wrongdoer, and failing to punish their enemy have not even saved themselves; while many who have trusted in force to gain an advantage, instead of gaining anything more, have been doomed to lose what they had. Vengeance is not necessarily successful because wrong has been done, or strength sure because it is confident; but the incalculable element in the future exercises the widest influence, and is the most treacherous, and yet in fact the most useful of all things as it frightens us all equally, and thus makes us consider before attacking each other.

This is from The Landmark Thucydides, edited by Robert B Strassler, Book 4, section 62.

Why is Congress Stalled?

2011-04-25T13:27:00.002-04:00

Augustine of Hippo, in the Confessions, Book VIII, Section 9:

Why does this strange phenomenon occur? What causes it? The mind gives an order to the body and is at once obeyed, but when it gives an order to itself, it is resisted. The mind commands the hand to move and is so readily obeyed that the order can scarcely be distinguished from its execution. Yet the mind is mind and the hand is part of the body. But when the mind commands the mind to make an act of will, these two are one and the same and yet the order is not obeyed. Why does this happen? What is the cause of it? The mind orders itself to make an act of will, and it would not give this order unless it willed to do so; yet it does not carry out its own command. But it does not fully will to do this thing and therefore its orders are not fully given. It gives the order only in so far as it wills, and in so far as it does not will the order is not carried out. For the will commands that an act of will should be made, and it gives this command to itself, not to some other will. The reason, then, why the command is not obeyed is that it is not given with the full will. For if the will were full, it would not command itself to be full, since it would be so already. It is therefore no strange phenomenon partly to will to do something and partly to will not to do it. It is a disease of the mind, which does not wholly rise to the heights where it is lifted by the truth, because it is weighed down by habit. So there are two wills in us, because neither by itself is the whole will, and each possesses what the other lacks.

So perhaps we could argue that the Congress is of two wills - not Democratic and Republican, but rather one will oriented toward principle and the other oriented toward expediency.

Advice from one of the Seven Sages

2011-04-17T19:53:00.002-04:00

It may well be that, as many are fond of saying, this is the greatest country ever. Let us suppose it to be so, even though it is hard to ignore many cogent counter-arguments. But in our supposed superiority, why do we not heed the advice of Chilon? The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, in his Pensieri, left incomplete at his death in 1837, explains (as translated by J. G. Nichols):

Chilon, who is numbered among the Seven Sages of Greece, advised that the man who is physically strong should be gentle in his behavior, with the purpose, he said, of inspiring in others reverence rather than fear. Affability, a pleasant manner, and even humility are never superfluous in those who, in beauty or intellect or in anything else much desired by the world, are manifestly superior to the majority. This is because the fault for which they have to beg pardon is so grievous, and the enemy they have to placate is so cruel and exacting. The former is superiority, and the latter is envy. The ancients believed this. When they found themselves honoured and in prosperity, they thought it necessary to placate the very gods, expiating with humiliation, with offerings, and with voluntary penances the scarcely expiable sin of happiness and excellence.

Manichees on the TV

2011-04-12T16:59:00.003-04:00

So I'm thinking that when Saint Augustine was writing this about the founder of the Manichean heresy, he wasn't trying to foreshadow the Beck. Indeed, given the prominent mention of the motions of earth, sun, and moon, perhaps he was anticipating O'Reilly?

[Manes] wrote at great length on scientific subjects, only to be proved wrong by genuine scientists, thereby making perfectly clear the true nature of his insight into more abstruse matters. Because he did not want them to think lightly of him, he tried to convince his followers that the Holy Spirit, who comforts and enriches your faithful servants, was present in him personally and with full powers. Therefore, when he was shown to be wrong in what he said about the sky and the stars and the movements of the sun and the moon, it was obvious that he was guilty of sacrilegious presumption, because, although these matters are no part of religious doctrine, he was not only ignorant of the subjects which he taught, but also taught what was false, yet was demented and conceited enough to claim that his utterances were those of a divine person.

[This is from the Confessions, Book V, Section 5, as translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin. Love that name.]

Ahhh - Polish coffee!

2011-04-06T19:38:00.002-04:00

When I visited Poland, I didn't know if the quality of the coffee was intrinsic, or due to the fact that I was enjoying it in sidewalk cafes in the old market square in Krakow. Even so, there's no way it was as good as it apparently was at the turn of the 19th century. Here is Adam Mickiewicz describing it in his landmark poem Pan Tadeusz, as translated by Kenneth Mackenzie:

There is no coffee like the Polish kind;
In all well-ordered households you will find
A special coffee maker – ‘tis her charge
To purchase from the river-trader’s barge
Or from the city store the finest beans,
And to prepare it she has secret means,
As black as coal, as amber clearly glowing,
As mocha fragrant, thick as honey flowing.

Beck Before Beck?

2011-04-05T19:13:00.003-04:00

The Wisdom of Amene-em-opet was first found by Wallis Budge in 1888. It appears to have been written in the Egypt of the New Kingdom, during the reigns of the Ramesses, sometime between 1279 and 1069 BCE. It is particularly well-known because so many passages parallel verses in the Proverbs of Solomon. What seems to have been missed, though, is a brilliant description of The Beck, three millennia before his time:

Pass by the speeches of the always aggravated man
faster than wind over wave –
He is one who destroys, builds only with his tongue,
so that he speaks of things in empty words.
He answers, aching to do battle,
and his purpose is to injure;
He fosters strife among all people,
loading his speech with lies.
He knits a slippery meaning out of intertwisted words,
fighting and quarreling he comes and goes,
Then dines at home
while his retorts are festering outside.
One day his wrongs will rise to censure him,
woe to his children then!
If only Khnum would take him back into his hands –
to the potter’s wheel with the hot-mouthed man! –
That he might knead some sense into his senseless skull.
For he is like the jackal’s offspring in the cattle-pen:
It turns its eye against its own companions,
it makes the herdsmen gibber,
It runs before the wind like stormy weather,
it dims the brightness of the sun,
It flicks its tail like the young crocodile,
it leaps upon its prey –
Its lips are sweetened, its tongue darts out,
and a fire burns in its belly.
Make no attempt to humor such a one –
let the respect that once you offered be no more.

The MADness of Climate Change

2011-02-25T15:33:00.000-05:00

During the Cold War, international relations were structured by the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD); measures were taken so that irresponsible action by a few did not lead to the destruction of all. As the impact of climate changes worsens, will we be entering a Warming War in which we adopt a new concept of MAD, taking measures to ensure that the irresponsible failures to act of the few will not lead to the assured destruction of all?

Max Beerbohm is chiding us from the grave.

2010-11-20T17:28:00.002-05:00

From Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911:

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hindlegs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilization. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost - he becomes just a unit in unreason.

Isaiah Berlin on Pluralism

2010-10-29T12:59:00.002-04:00

In 1996, Isaiah Berlin wrote a summary of his ideas for a collection to be used by Chinese students, Contemporary British and American Philosophy and Philosophers, edited by Ouyang Kang and Steve Fuller. Called 'My Intellectual Path', it was also published by The New York Review of Books in a small volume called The First and the Last. In these days of bitter politics, his ruminations on pluralism are particularly significant:

I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments. I am not a relativist; I do not say ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps’ – each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false. But I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ. There is not an infinity of them: the number of human values, of values which I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite – let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference this makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.

I think these values are objective – that is to say, their nature, the pursuit of them, is part of what it is to be a human being, and this is an objective given. The fact that men are men and women are women and not dogs or cats or tables or chairs is an objective fact; and part of this objective fact is that there are certain values, and only those values, which men, while remaining men, can puersue. If I am a man or a woman with sufficient imagination (and this I do need), I can enter into a value system which is not my own, but which is nevertheless something I can conceive of men pursuing while remaining human, while remaining creatures with whom I can communicate, with whom I have some common values – for all human beings must have some common values or they cease to be human, and also some different values else they cease to differ, as in fact they do.

That is why pluralism is not relativism – the multiple values are objective, part of the essence of humanity rather than arbitrary creations of men’s subjective fancies. Nevertheless, of course, if I pursue one set of values I may detest another, and may think it is damaging to the only form of life that I am able to live or tolerate, for myself and others; in which case I may attack it, I may even – in extreme cases – have to go to war against it. But I still recognize it as a human pursuit. I find Nazi values detestable, but I can understand how, given enough misinformation, enough false belief about reality, one could come to believe that they are the only salvation. Of course they have to be fought, by war if need be, but I do not regard the Nazis, as some people do, as literally pathological or insane, only as wickedly wrong, totally misguided about the facts, for example in believing that some beings are sub-human, or that race is central, or that Nordic races alone are truly creative, and so forth. I see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.

If pluralism is a valid view, and respect between systems of values which are not necessarily hostile to each other is possible, then toleration and liberal consequences follow, as they do not either from monism (only one set of values is true, all the others are false) or from relativism (my values are mine, yours are yours, and if we clash, too bad, neither of us can claim to be right).

Is the Corruption of Congress an Inevitable Consequence of Division of Labor?

2010-06-02T11:51:00.003-04:00

Adam Ferguson, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), analyzes the effects of division of labor ('separation of arts') on society in general, and here on the conduct of deliberative bodies:

The principal objections, to democratical or popular government, are taken from the inequalities which arise among men in the result of commercial arts. And it must be confessed, that popular assemblies, when composed of men whose dispositions are sordid, and whose ordinary applications are illiberal, however they may be intrusted with the choice of their masters and leaders, are certainly, in their own persons, unfit to command. How can he who has confined his views to his own subsistence or preservation, be intrusted with the conduct of nations? Such men, when admitted to deliberate on matters of state, bring to its councils confusion and tumult, or servility and corruption; and seldom suffer it to repose from ruinous factions, or the effect of resolutions ill formed or ill conducted.

The Athenians retained their popular government under all these defects. The mechanic was obliged, under a penalty, to appear in the public market-place, and to hear debates on the subjects of war and of peace. He was tempted by pecuniary rewards, to attend on the trial of civil and criminal causes. But, notwithstanding an exercise tending so much to cultivate their talents, the indigent came always with minds intent upon profit, or with the habits of an illiberal calling. Sunk under the sense of their personal disparity and weakness, they were ready to resign themselves entirely to the influence of some popular leader, who flattered their passions, and wrought on their fears; or, actuated by envy, they were ready to banish from the state whomsoever was respectable and eminent in the superior order of citizens; and whether from their neglect of the public at one time, or their mal-administration at another, the sovereignty was every moment ready to drop from their hands.

The people, in this case, are, in fact, frequently governed by one, or a few, who know how to conduct them. Pericles possessed a species of princely authority at Athens; Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar, either jointly or successively, possessed for a considerable period the sovereign direction at Rome.

Whether in great or in small states, democracy is preserved with difficulty, under the disparities of condition, and the unequal cultivation of the mind, which attend the variety of pursuits, and applications, that separate mankind in the advanced state of commercial arts. In this, however, we do but plead against the form of democracy, after the principle is removed; and see the absurdity of pretensions to equal influence and consideration, after the characters of men have ceased to be similar.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Virginia Woolf

2010-04-12T10:48:00.003-04:00

In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf addresses three requests for contributions to worthy causes, which all fail to address the underlying social issues involving the suppression of educated women. At one point, she considers the problem of women trying to earn their support by writing for newspapers or magazines, but finding that they must adapt their opinions to those of their employers:

[L]et us refer them to the tradition which has long been honoured in the private house – the tradition of chastity. ‘Just as for many centuries, Madam,’ we might plead, ‘it was thought vile for a woman to sell her body without love, but right to give it to the husband whom she loved, so it is wrong, you will agree, to sell you mind without love, but right to give it to the art which you love.’ ‘But what,’ she may ask, ‘is meant by “selling your mind without love”?’ ‘Briefly,’ we might reply, ‘to write at the command of another person what you do not want to write for the sake of money. But to sell a brain is worse than to sell a body, for when the body seller has sold her momentary pleasure she takes good care that the matter shall end there. But when a brain seller has sold her brain, its anaemic, vicious and diseased progeny are let loose upon the world to infect and corrupt and sow the seeds of disease in others.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Lincoln on political difficulties

2010-04-05T18:20:00.002-04:00

Abraham Lincoln, reflecting on the 1864 election, which was arguably not American politics at its finest:

The strife of the election is but human nature practically applied to the facts of the case. What has occurred in this case, must ever recur in similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and as good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Advice from Seneca

2010-02-15T13:05:00.003-05:00

Times are tough. Seneca's usual response: 'Buck up!' But sometimes he gives a sense of how it's possible to keep going. This is from his letter to his mother, Helvia, sent after he was exiled. (Always a bad idea to have sex with the emperor's family.) The translation is by Moses Hadas.

[W]herever we stir the two resources which are the fairest of all attend us – nature, which is universal, and virtue, which is our own. Such was the design, believe me, of whatever force fashioned the universe, whether an omnipotent god, or impersonal Reason as artificer of vast creations, or divine Spirit permeating all things great and small with uniform tension, or Fate with its immutable nexus of interrelated causes – the design, I say, was that none but the paltriest of a man’s possessions should fall under the sway of another. Whatever is excellent in man lies outside man’s power; it can neither be given nor taken away. This world, than which Nature has wrought nothing greater or handsomer, and the human mind, its most magnificent portion, which contemplates the world and admires it, are our own forever, and will abide with us as long as we ourselves endure.

Monday Quote Frenzy: Rousseau vs Bush

2010-02-09T00:21:00.003-05:00

From Rousseau's Discourse on Political Economy:

By what inconceivable art has a means been found of making men free by making them subject; of using in the service of the State the properties, the persons and even the lives of all its members, without constraining and without consulting them; of confining their will by their own admission; of overcoming their refusal by that consent, and forcing them to punish themselves, when they act against their own will? How can it be that all should obey, yet nobody take upon him to command, and that all should serve, and yet have no masters, but be the more free, as, in apparent subjection, each loses no part of his liberty but what might be hurtful to that of another? These wonders are the work of law. It is to law alone that men owe justice and liberty. It is this salutary organ of the will of all which establishes, in civil right, the natural equality between men. It is this celestial voice which dictates to each citizen the precepts of public reason, and teaches him to act according to the rules of his own judgment, and not to behave inconsistently with himself. It is with this voice alone that political rulers should speak when they command; for no sooner does one man, setting aside the law, claim to subject another to his private will, than he departs from the state of civil society, and confronts him face to face in the pure state of nature, in which obedience is prescribed solely by necessity.

The most pressing interest of the ruler, and even his most indispensable duty, therefore, is to watch over the observation of the laws of which he is the minister, and on which his whole authority is founded. At the same time, if he exacts the observance of them from others, he is the more strongly bound to observe them himself, since he enjoys all their favour. For his example is of such force, that even if the people were willing to permit him to release himself from the yoke of the law, he ought to be cautious in availing himself of so dangerous a prerogative, which others might soon claim to usurp in their turn, and often use to his prejudice. At bottom, as all social engagements are mutual in nature, it is impossible for any one to set himself above the law, without renouncing its advantages; for nobody is bound by any obligation to one who claims that he is under no obligations to others. For this reason no exemption from the law will ever be granted, on any ground whatsoever, in a well-regulated government. Those citizens who have deserved well of their country ought to be rewarded with honours, but never with privileges: for the Republic is at the eve of its fall, when any one can think it fine not to obey the laws. If the nobility or the soldiery should ever adopt such a maxim, all would be lost beyond redemption.

Yeah, I still can't get over it.

Twenty Years Too Early

2009-11-23T16:47:00.002-05:00

Michael Schudson, on the profession of journalism:

Nineteenth-century journalism was certainly concerned that newspapers might not tell the truth. But the nineteenth-century worry was exclusively about intentional shadings of the truth for partisan ends. The concern was about the danger of partisan views. The twentieth century added the danger of partial views, the inevitable selectivity of facts, the inevitable exercise of judgment in interpreting the real world. The nineteenth century worried about journalists’ intentions and what they wanted to do. In the twentieth century, there is an additional concern about journalists’ attentions and what they are able to see and do. In the nineteenth century, there was fear that journalists would not simply record the world but would think about it and promote their own thinking. In the twentieth century there is the new worry that journalists will simply record and will not think, thereby promoting someone else’s thinking, namely that of the government and other powerful interests.

From ‘The Profession of Journalism in the United States’, in Nathan Hatch, ed., The Professions in American History (1988), p. 154.

Definition

2009-09-03T16:50:00.002-04:00

A university is a place where you are on a first-name basis with people who are so important that they never have time to meet with you.

Monday Quote Frenzy: Dostoyevsky disagrees with rational choice theory

2009-08-31T16:47:00.003-04:00

From Notes from Underground, as translated by Andrew MacAndrew:

But then, one might do anything out of boredom. Golden pins are stuck into people out of boredom. But that’s nothing. What’s really bad (this is me speaking again) is that the golden pins will be welcomed then. The trouble with man is that he’s stupid. Phenomenally stupid. That is, even if he’s not really stupid, he’s so ungrateful that another creature as ungrateful cannot be found. I, for one, wouldn’t be the least surprised if, in that future age of reason, there suddenly appeared a gentleman with an ungrateful, or shall we say, retrogressive smirk, who, arms akimbo, would say:

‘What do you say, folks, let’s send all this reason to hell, just to get all these logarithm tables out from under our feet and go back to our own stupid ways.’

That isn’t so annoying in itself; what’s bad is that this gentleman would be sure to find followers. That’s the way man is made.

And the explanation for it is so simple that there hardly seems to be any need for it – namely, that a man, always and everywhere, prefers to act in the way he feels like acting and not in the way his reason and interest tell him, for it is very possible for a man to feel like acting against his interests and, in some instances, I say that he positively wants to act that way – but that’s my personal opinion.

So one’s own free, unrestrained choice, one’s own whim, be it the wildest, one’s own fancy, sometimes worked up to a frenzy – that is the most advantageous advantage that cannot be fitted into any table or scale and that causes every system and every theory to crumble into dust on contact. And where did these sages pick up the notion that man must have something that they feel is a normal and virtuous set of wishes; what makes them think that man’s will must be reasonable and in accordance with his own interests? All man actually needs is independent will, at all costs and whatever the consequences.

Monday Quote Frenzy - John Masefield on Marco Polo

2009-07-20T13:37:00.003-04:00

John Masefield wrote a foreword for a 1908 edition of The Travels of Marco Polo. He seems to have liked voyagers, as he also did the foreword for an edition of Dampier's travels. Henry Miller picked it up and referred to it in his story 'My Dream of Mobile', which is included in the collection The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. I think it relates not only to the physical traveler, but also to the intellectual, wandering among books.

It is accounted a romantic thing to wander among strangers and to eat their bread by the camp-fires of the other half of the world. There is romance in doing this, though the romance has been over-estimated by those whose sedentary lives have created in them a false taste for action. Marco Polo wandered among strangers; but it is open to any one (with courage and the power of motion) to do the same. Wandering in itself is merely a form of self-indulgence. If it adds not to the stock of human knowledge, or if it gives not to others the imaginative possession of some part of the world, it is a pernicious habit. The acquisition of knowledge, the accumulation of fact, is noble only in those few who have that alchemy which transmutes such clay to heavenly eternal gold…. It is only the wonderful traveler who sees a wonder, and only five travelers in the world’s history have seen wonders. The others have seen birds and beasts, rivers and wastes, the earth and the (local) fullness thereof. The five travelers are Herodotus, Gaspar, Melchior, Balthazar and Marco Polo himself. The wonder of Marco Polo is this – that he created Asia for the European mind….

Monday Quote Frenzy: Two from Karel Čapek

2009-07-06T11:56:00.002-04:00

Quoted by Ivan Klima in his introduction to War with the Newts:

You don’t see two bales of hay, but thousands of straws. Straw by straw you gather what is good and useful in the human world; straw by straw you discard the chaff and the weeds. You don’t cry out because of the oppression of thousands but because of the oppression of any individual; you’ve had to destroy the one truth in order to find thousands of them…. Ultimately, for want of anything more perfect, you simply believe in people.

Čapek in a 1926 letter to the New York Sunday Times:

Do you recall how Homer depicts Achilles’ shield? It took one song of the Iliad for the blind poet to describe how that shield was made; in America you would have made a casting and produced tens of thousands per day; granted, shields might be made cheaply and successfully this way, but Iliads could not…. To my knowledge, American efficiency concerns itself with multiplying output, not life. It’s true that man works in order to live; but it is evident that he lives also while he is working. Once could say that European Man is a very poor industrial machine; but this is because he is not a machine at all.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Sallust

2009-06-15T11:32:00.003-04:00

This is from the beginning of Sallust's The War Against Jugurtha, from a new translation by Michael Comber and Catalina Balmaceda. Sallust was an areteicist, who was already complaining about the declining ethical standard of the Roman senatus populusque before the Republic had fallen. He was roughly contemporary with Cicero, but they were not friends.

It is unreasonable for men to complain that their nature is weak and short-lived, and ruled by chance, not by virtue. For, upon reflection, you would discover that, on the contrary, there is nothing greater or more excellent than man’s nature and that what is lacking is not strength or time, but rather energy. What guides and rules human life is the mind. If this pursues glory by the path of virtue, it has power, might and fame in abundance, and is independent of fortune, which can neither give anyone honesty, energy, and other good qualities, nor take them away. But if, enslaved by base passions, it has sunk into lethargy and the pleasures of the body, brief is the enjoyment of its ruinous appetites; then, when strength, time and talents have been frittered away through laziness, the weakness of human nature bears the blame, and the real culprits shift the responsibility from themselves to their circumstances. But if men pursued good things with as much eagerness as they show for what is against their interests and unprofitable – and often even dangerous – they would control events instead of being controlled by them, and would reach such a height of greatness and glory that from mere mortals they would become immortal.

Cicero on the Stimulus Package

2009-04-08T17:08:00.004-04:00

Several state governors have said that, in order to assert their position that the stimulus package is a bad idea, they will refuse all or part of the money. Cicero, however, recommends the opposite approach, in this anecdote from the Tusculan Disputations, Book III, Section XX, as translated by J. E. King for the Loeb Classical Library:

The famous Piso, named Frugi, had spoken consistently against the Corn-law [the Lex Frumentaria of 123 BCE, proposed by C. Sempronius Gracchus, and later called the lex Sempronia]. When the law was passed, in spite of his consular rank, he was there to receive the corn. Gracchus noticed Piso standing in the throng; he asked him in the hearing of the Roman people what consistency there was in coming for the corn under the terms of the law which he had opposed. ‘I shouldn’t like it, Gracchus, to come into your head to divide up my property among all the citizens; but should you do so I should come for my share.’ Did not the words of this serious and sagacious statesman show with sufficient clearness that the public inheritance was squandered by the Sempronian law?

Monday Quote Frenzy: What's Wrong With This Picture?

2009-03-23T18:22:00.002-04:00

James Bryce was a British historian and (Liberal) politician. In 1888, he published The American Commonwealth, a study of all of America's institutions - political, social, religious, etc. It included a chapter on American universities and colleges. After completing his stint as British Ambassador to the United States, he returned to his study and updated it, publishing the new version in 1917. In closing the section in which he revisits the universities, he gives the following assessment:

Foreign critics often say, and some domestic critics have echoed the censure, that what is chiefly admired in America is Bigness, things being measured by their size or by what they cost. This quantitative estimate finds little place in the Universities. With very few exceptions, the teaching staff are not thinking of size, nor of money, except so far as it helps to extend the usefulness of their institution. All the better men, and not merely the ablest men, but the good average men, feel that it is the mission of a University to seek and find and set forth the real values. It has been well said by one of the most acute and large-minded of all recent visitors to the United States [Professor Dr. Lamprecht of Leipzig in his Amerikana] that nowhere in the world do University teachers feel more strongly that the first object of their devotion is Truth. They are of all classes in the country that which is least dazzled by wealth, least governed by material considerations. No wealth-seeker would, indeed, choose such a profession. To one who looks back over the last twenty years, the Universities seem to have grown not only in their resources and the number of their students, but also in dignity and influence. They hold a higher place in the eyes of the Nation. They have almost entirely escaped any deleterious contact either with politics or with those capitalistic groups whose power is felt in so many other directions. Through the always widening circle of their alumni they are more closely in touch than ever before with all classes in the community. The European observer can express now with even more conviction than he could twenty years ago the opinion that they constitute one of the most powerful and most pervasive forces working for good in the country.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith on the Modern University

2009-03-20T12:55:00.002-04:00

In universities, those who were in pursuit of truth have to a significant extent been followed by those in pursuit of research grants, or of promotions. Truth itself, as the proclaimed goal of a university, has largely been reduced from something that we serve to something that serves us; from something to which we aspire to something that we construct. The academic enterprise then becomes the knowledge industry: the instrument by which a society turns out knowledge as it turns out motor cars, for consumption and for our own profit or pleasure or aggrandizement. Socrates’s ‘knowledge is virtue’ has been widely replaced by Bacon’s ‘knowledge is power’. Rationalism in the sense of a disciplined subservient dedication of oneself to the rule of transcendent Reason, has been largely replaced by a new rationalism that is concerned rather and only with the appropriateness of instrumental means to unscrutinized ends. Classically, Europe had held that to seek what is not morally good is as irrational as to think what is not intellectually true.

‘Shall Next Century be Secular or Religious?’, published in Cosmos, Life, Religion: Beyond Humanism, Tenri, Japan: Tenri University Press, 1988, pp. 125-151; reprinted in Modern Culture from a Comparative Perspective, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, p. 72.

Slavery and Carbon

2009-02-05T12:46:00.002-05:00

Consider the following, from Dorinda Outram's 2005 book The Enlightenment:

Slavery and the slave trade, and especially the version of it that reached its peak in the Caribbean and Brazil, were essential to the increasingly integrated world economy of the Enlightenment. They were embedded in powerful, highly organized, economic structures. Slave labour returned high profits to those in the slave trade, and also to those involved in colonial plantation production. While these profits might not have been the key to the industrial revolution, they certainly primed the economic pump, and provided higher tax revenues to the ever-expanding governments… To begin to question the existence of slavery itself, rather than deploring the situation of individual slaves, was thus in Enlightenment terms to have to think thoughts which were not only difficult but which also logically involved the dismantling of a profitable, successful, and globally organized economic structure. It is not difficult to see why anti-slavery mobilization took so long to come together.

What strikes me is the ease with which such a description could apply to the modern, carbon-burning economy. It is just as true for us that the exploitation of coal and oil is so deeply embedded in our global economic structure that it is hard to see how we could extricate ourselves.

My question, then, is to what extent the details of this historical case may be guidelines to resolving our present situation.

Interesting that we haven't settled this question yet

2008-12-18T10:38:00.003-05:00

From Richard Hofstadter, 'The Higher Learning in America,' in The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States, by Richard Hofstadter and C. DeWitt Hardy, Columbia University Press, New York, 1952, pp. 107-108:

If it is democratic to admit to our colleges great numbers of students who lack intellectual interests and to attune the educational system to their sub-intellectual needs and capacities, there has been an excess of democracy in the conduct of American higher education. State universities are commonly required to admit all graduates of state high schools who have academic records that can be examined without shuddering, with the consequence that an unholy proportion of the freshman classes in these institutions consists of sheer excess baggage. This is ‘democracy’ with a vengeance. But if by democracy we mean equality of recruitment among the intellectually able without regard to the limitations of their purses, American colleges and universities could welcome an extension of it.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Learned Hand

2008-11-03T18:59:00.002-05:00

This from ‘Sources of Tolerance’, delivered before the Juristic Society of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, June 1930, and reprinted from the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (November 1930, vol. LXXIX, pp. 1-14) in the collection The Spirit of Liberty (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952).

[W]hat nature has not done for us, perhaps time can. I conceive that there is nothing which gives a man more pause before taking as absolute what his feelings welcome, and his mind deems plausible, than even the flicker of a recollection that something of the sort has been tried before, felt before, disputed before, and for some reason or other has not quite gone into Limbo. Historians may be dogmatists, I know, though not so often now as when history was dogma. At least you will perhaps agree that even a smattering of history and especially of letters will go far to dull the edges of uncompromising conviction…. Besides, it is not so much history one learns as the fact that one is aware that man has had a history at all. The liberation is not in the information but in the background acquired, the sense of mutability, and of the transience of what seems so poignant and so pressing today....

In short, I argue that the political life of a country like ours would get depth and steadiness, would tend to escape its greatest danger, which is the disposition to take the immediate for the eternal, to press the advantage of present numbers to the full, to ignore dissenters and regard them as heretics, by some adumbration of what men have thought and felt in other times and at other places....

[T]oday in America vast concourses of youth are flocking to our colleges, eager for something, just what they do not know. It makes much difference what they get. They will be prone to demand something they can immediately use; the tendency is strong to give it them; science, economics, business administration, law in its narrower sense. I submit that the shepherds should not first feed the flocks with these. I argue for the outlines of what used to go as a liberal education – not necessarily in the sense that young folks should waster precious years in efforts, unsuccessful for some reason I cannot understand, to master ancient tongues; but I speak for an introduction into the thoughts and deeds of men who have lived before them, in other countries that their own, with other strifes and other needs. This I maintain, not in the interest of that general cultural background, which is so often a cloak for the superior person, the prig, the snob and the pedant. But I submit to you that in some such way alone can we meet and master the high-power salesman of political patent medicines. I come to you, not as an advocate of education for education’s sake, but as one, who like you, I suppose, is troubled by the spirit of faction, by the catch-words with the explosive energy of faith behind them, by the unwillingness to live and let live with which we are plagued. It is well enough to put one’s faith in education, but the kind makes a vast difference....

We shall not succeed by any attempt to put the old wine in new bottles; liberty is an essence so volatile that it will escape any vial however corked. It rests in the hearts of men, in the belief that knowledge is hard to get, that man must break through again and again the thin crust on which he walks, that the certainties of today may become the superstitions of tomorrow; that we have no warrant of assurance save by everlasting readiness to test and test again.

Schiller on McCain

2008-10-20T16:04:00.003-04:00

I was prompted to bring out Schiller's play The Maiden of Orleans because of a famous quote: "Against stupidity e’en gods contend in vain." But it turns out that the speech itself seems oddly relevant to the McCain campaign these days.

Talbot, the English knight, is trying to catch and regroup his forces, who are fleeing in terror from The Maid. Sure that his defeat lies in the superstitious folly of the troops, he pauses to rest beneath a tree and complain that Reason is no longer in control. His characterization of Reason, as the "wise establisher/ Of this world’s edifice" could fit a legislator, and might even match McCain's self-image. Hence, the eerie resonance in his next question:

Who art thou then, if thou, bound to the tail
Of frenzy’s insane steed, and calling out
In vain, must hurl thyself with open eyes
Into the abyss with thy maddened mount?

Rough Speech

2008-09-04T19:23:00.002-04:00

Albert Guérard, The Testament of a Liberal (1956):

[R]oughness, for all its bluff vigor, can be the most insidious enemy of thought. Never speak roughly, and above all strive never to think roughly. There is more peril in a rough truth than in a refined delusion. For a refined delusion, carried to the extreme point of refinement, is self-refuting. A rough truth tends to get rougher, more hopelessly entangled with errors and lies; and its core of rightness breeds self-righteousness, which drugs the intellect and perverts the will. A rough truth is bound to seek the support of rough force: in the vernacular, to get tough and crack down on its opponents. A rough truth roughly enforced means fanaticism, the never-failing source of most human ills.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Mencken: 'A New Use for Churches'

2008-07-07T15:26:00.002-04:00

This is the whole of Chapter 39 in Mencken's Damn! A Book of Calumny, originally published in 1918.

The argument by design, it may be granted, establishes a reasonable ground for accepting the existence of God. It makes belief, at all events, quite as intelligible as unbelief. But when the theologians take their step from the existence of God to the goodness of God they tread upon much less firm earth. How can one see any proof of that goodness in the senseless and intolerable sufferings of man – his helplessness, the brief and troubled span of his life, the inexplicable disproportion between his deserts and his rewards, the tragedy of his soaring aspiration, the worse tragedy of his dumb questioning? Granting the existence of God, a house dedicated to Him naturally follows. He is all-important; it is fit that man should take some notice of Him. But why praise and flatter him for his unspeakable cruelties? Why forget so supinely His failures to remedy the easily remediable? Why, indeed, devote the churches exclusively to worship? Why not give them over, now and then, to justifiable indignation meetings?

Perhaps men will incline to this idea later on. It is not inconceivable, indeed, that religion will one day cease to be a poltroonish acquiescence and become a vigorous and insistent criticism. If God can hear a petition, what ground is there for holding that He would not hear a complaint? It might, indeed, please Him to find His creatures grown so self-reliant and reflective. More, it might even help Him to get through His infinitely complex and difficult work. Theology has already moved toward such notions. It has abandoned the primitive doctrine of God’s arbitrariness and indifference, and substituted the doctrine that He is willing, and even eager, to hear the desires of His creatures – i.e., their private notions, born of experience, as to what would be best for them. Why assume that those notions would be any the less worth hearing and heeding if they were cast in the form of criticism, and even of denunciation? Why hold that the God who can understand and forgive even treason could not understand and forgive remonstrance?

The Pursuit of Happiness

2008-06-17T16:32:00.001-04:00

Reinhold Niebuhr, writing in The Irony of American History (1952):

Happiness is desired by all men; and moments of it are probably attained by most men. Only moments of it can be attained because happiness is the inner concomitant of neat harmonies of body, spirit and society; and these neat harmonies are bound to be infrequent. There is no simple harmony between our ambitions and achievements because all ambitions tend to outrun achievements. There is no neat harmony between the conscious ends of life and the physical instruments for its attainment; for the health of the body is frail and uncertain…. There is no neat harmony between personal desires and ambitions and the ends of human societies no matter how frantically we insist with the eighteenth century that communities are created only for the individual. Communities, cultures and civilizations are subject to perils which must be warded off by individuals who may lose their life in the process. There are many young American men in Korea today who have been promised the ‘pursuit of happiness’ as an inalienable right. But the possession of the right brings them no simple happiness. Such happiness as they achieve is curiously mixed with pain, anxiety and sorrow. It is in fact not happiness at all. If it is anything, it may be what Lincoln called ‘the solemn joy that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.’

On making fun of bad guys

2008-05-29T16:57:00.002-04:00

In an interview with Roger Errera in 1974, later captured in the New York Review of Books (10/26/1978), Hannah Arendt cited this comment by Berthold Brecht:

The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who permitted great political crimes, which is something entirely different…. If the ruling classes permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history. That is, the fact that he becomes a great crook and that what he does has great consequences does not add to his stature.

Once again, we see that the best response to political sleaze is ridicule.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Pascal

2008-05-26T21:30:00.001-04:00

When I see the blindness and misery of man and the astonishing contradictions revealed in his nature; and observe the whole universe mute, and man without light, abandoned to himself, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him here, or what he has come here to do, or what will become of him in dying; I feel fear like a man who has been carried when asleep into a desert and fearful island, and has waked without knowing where he is and without having means of rescue. And thereupon I wonder how man escapes despair at so miserable an estate. I see others about me, like myself, and I ask them if they are better informed than I, and they tell me no. And then these wretched wanderers, after looking about them and seeing some pleasant object, have given themselves up and attached themselves to it. As for me, I cannot stop there, or rest in the company of these persons, wholly like myself, miserable like me, impotent like me. I see that they would not help me to die; I shall die alone; I must then act as though alone; but if I were alone I should not build houses; I should not fret myself with bustling occupations; I should seek the esteem of no one, but I should try only to discover the truth.

So, considering how much appearance there is that something exists other than what I see, I have sought whether this God of whom everyone talks may not have left some marks of himself. I search everywhere, and see only obscurity everywhere. Nature offers me nothing by matter of possible doubt and disquiet. If I saw there nothing to mark a divinity, I should make up my mind to believe nothing of it. If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator, I should rest in peace in faith. But seeing too much to deny, and too little to affirm, I am in a pitiable state, where I have an hundred times wished that, if a God supports nature, she would show it without equivocation; and that, if the marks she gives are deceptive, she would suppress them wholly; that she say all or nothing, that I may see my path.

Administrative Burdens

2008-05-13T18:04:00.002-04:00

The University of New Mexico is going through a strategic planning exercise, which stirs up the traditional complaint that it is a waste of time. (Old saying: Strategic planning is a waste of time, unless you don't do it.) The faculty in particular are unhappy at the amount of time they have to spend in committee meetings and planning discussions. It is a familiar complaint.

I had not realized how familiar, though, until I read the following item in the first volume of A History of the University in Europe. Philippus de Grevia started as a magister at the University of Paris in 1206, and became its chancellor from 1218 to 1236. He was a theologian, a poet, and an archetypal faculty member:

At one time, when each magister taught independently and when the name of the university was unknown, there were more lectures and disputations and more interest in scholarly things. Now, however, when you have joined yourselves together in a university, lectures and disputations have become less frequent; everything is done hastily, little is learnt, and the time needed for study is wasted in meetings and discussions.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Henry Adams on Why One Writes

2008-05-12T19:27:00.002-04:00

In 1901, Adams was trying to process the experience of the technological progress of the age (having spent a lot of time at Samuel Langley's exhibition of modern engineering artifacts). In The Education of Henry Adams, he reflects on his pursuit of education after trying to work out the parallel paths of cultural energy associated with the dynamo and the Virgin.

The pursuit turned out to be long and tortuous, leading at last to the vast forests of scholastic science. From Zeno to Descartes, hand in hand with Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and Pascal, one stumbled as stupidly as though one were still a German student of 1860. Only with the instinct of despair could one force one's self into this old thicket of ignorance after having been repulsed a score of entrances more promising and more popular. Thus far, no path had led anywhere, unless perhaps to an exceedingly modest living. Forty-five years of study had proved to be quite futile for the pursuit of power; one controlled no more force in 1900 than in 1850, although the amount of force controlled by society had enormously increased. The secret of education still hid itself somewhere behind ignorance, and one fumbled over it as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths, the staff is a force almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a sort of blind-man's dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen works for itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic material over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too well; for often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths and shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then it has to return on its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force. The result of a year's work depends more on what is struck out than on what is left in; on the sequence of the main lines of thought, than on their play or variety.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Tolstoy on the Familiar Tyrant

2008-01-21T14:35:00.000-05:00

Continual brazen flattery from everybody round him, in the teeth of obvious facts, had brought him to such a state that he no longer saw his own inconsistencies or measured his actions and words by reality, logic or even by simple common sense; but was quite convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust, and mutually contradictory they might be, became reasonable just and mutually accordant simply because he gave them.

As it happens, this is Tolstoy's description of Czar Nicholas I, from Hadji Murad. But it could apply to so many...

The Pensive Astronomer

2007-12-20T17:08:00.000-05:00

There is a wonderful description by Frederick Douglass of the way the desert draws one to the sky. As an astronomer transplanted to New Mexico, I respond more to this now that I no longer lie under skies overwashed by the lights of the East Coast.

In this wide waste, under this cloudless sky, star-lighted by night and by a fierce blazing sun by day, where even the wind seems voiceless, it was natural for men to look up to the sky and stars and contemplate the universe and infinity above and around them; the signs and wonders in the heavens above and the earth beneath. In such loneliness, silence, and expansiveness, imagination is unchained and man has naturally a deeper sense of the Infinite Presence than is to be felt in the noise and bustle of the towns and men-crowded cities. … The heart beats louder and the soul hears quicker in silence and solitude.

From The Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Library of America (1994), pp. 1009-1010.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Hobbes on Citing the Ancients

2007-10-29T23:20:00.000-04:00

At the end of Leviathan, Hobbes takes a moment to consider the practice of salting one’s text with relevant quotes from ancient sources – as he would have it, sticking one’s doctrine with the cloves of other men’s wit. As that is much of what I am about here, it seems only fair to raise the complaint, as he is no longer able to do so.

There is nothing I distrust more than my elocution, which nevertheless I am confident (excepting the mischances of the press) is not obscure. That I have neglected the ornament of quoting ancient poets, orators, and philosophers, contrary to the custom of late time, whether I have done well or ill in it, proceedeth from my judgement, grounded on many reasons. For first, all truth of doctrine dependeth either upon reason or upon Scripture; both which give credit to many, but never receive it from any writer. Secondly, the matters in question are not of fact, but of right, wherein there is no place for witnesses. There is scarce any of those old writers that contradicteth not sometimes both himself and others; which makes their testimonies insufficient. Fourthly, such opinions as are taken only upon credit of antiquity are not intrinsically the judgement of those that cite them, but words that pass, like gaping, from mouth to mouth. Fifthly, it is many times with a fraudulent design that men stick their corrupt doctrine with the cloves of other men's wit. Sixthly, I find not that the ancients they cite took it for an ornament to do the like with those that wrote before them. Seventhly, it is an argument of indigestion, when Greek and Latin sentences unchewed come up again, as they use to do, unchanged. Lastly, though I reverence those men of ancient time that either have written truth perspicuously, or set us in a better way to find it out ourselves; yet to the antiquity itself I think nothing due. For if we will reverence the age, the present is the oldest: if the antiquity of the writer, I am not sure that generally they to whom such honour is given, were more ancient when they wrote than I am that am writing: but if it be well considered, the praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

Things that keep program managers awake at night

2007-07-07T22:36:00.000-04:00

Shankar Vedantam writes a column on cognitive science in the Washington Post. On December 4 last year, he was talking to Scott Plous, a social psychologist and author of "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making". What caught my eye was:

"Rational decision-making should not be driven primarily by recovery of past costs," Plous said. "If you can no longer justify it in terms of what it will bring in the future and what its realistic prospects are, that is a warning sign you may have become entrapped."

Other techniques to avoid entrapment in everyday life include making sure that a decision to continue on a path is not made solely by people who decided on that path in the first place, by setting limits on investments upfront and by triggering automatic reviews if a plan of action hits certain predetermined failure points.

Return of the Monday Quote Frenzy

2007-07-02T21:53:00.000-04:00

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Stéphane Mallarmé, Variations sur un sujet

Monday Quote Frenzy - John Stuart Mill on Jury Duty

2007-03-19T22:08:00.000-04:00

Mill is here reflecting on the classical Athenian custom of having all citizens serve both in the ecclesia (the legislative body) and the dicastery (commonly translated as jury, although it was the same group as the ecclesia acting in a judicial mode).

It is not sufficiently considered how little there is in most men’s ordinary life to give any largeness either to their conceptions or to their sentiments… in most cases the individual has no access to any person of cultivation much superior to his own. Giving him something to do for the public, supplies, in a measure, all these deficiencies. If circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned to him to be considerable, it makes him an educated man. Notwithstanding the defects of the social system and moral ideas of antiquity, the practice of the dicastery and the ecclesia raised the intellectual standard of an average Athenian citizen far beyond anything of which there is yet an example in any other mass of men, ancient or modern. … He is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good: and he usually finds associated with him in the same work minds more familiarized than his own with these ideas and operations, whose study it will be to supply reasons to his understanding, and stimulation to his feeling for the general interest.

This first appeared in Considerations on Representative Government, but was developed further in the first section of Mill’s review of Democracy in America, in the October 1840 Edinburgh Review, and reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions, London, 1859, vol. 2, pp. 1-83.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Eco on Duty

2007-03-05T21:40:00.000-05:00

Umberto Eco's essay "The Power of Falsehood" was originally delivered as the inaugural lecture for the academic year 1994-1995 at the University of Bologna. An expanded version was published in the collection On Literature, and was the source of the excerpt here:

In my essay on fakes and forgeries, written some years ago, I concluded that there certainly exist tools, either empirical or conjectural, to prove that something is a fake, but that every judgment on the question presupposes the existence of an original that is authentic and true, against which the forgery is compared; however, the real cognitive problem consists not only in proving that something is a forgery but in proving that the authentic object is just that: authentic.

And yet this obvious consideration must not lead us to conclude that there is no criterion of truth, and that stories said to be false are the same as those that we consider today to be true, just because both belong to the literary genre of narrative fiction. There is a practice of verification that is based on slow, collective, public work done by what Charles Sanders Peirce called the Community. It is through our human faith in the work of this community that we can say, with a certain degree of tranquility, that the Constitutum Constantini was a forgery, that the earth moves around the sun, and that Saint Thomas Aquinas at least knew that the earth was round. ...

Since for some people the suspicion that the sun does not go around the earth seemed at a certain moment in history just as foolish and execrable as the suspicion that the universe does not exist, it is useful to keep our mind free and fresh for the moment when the community of men of science decrees that the idea of the universe was an illusion, just like the flat earth and the Rosicrucians.

Deep down, the first duty of the Community is to be on the alert in order to be able to rewrite the encyclopedia every day.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Speaking Out

2007-02-26T12:57:00.000-05:00

John Stuart Mill, from On Liberty:

[T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.

Herman Melville, from Moby-Dick, chapter 9, “The Sermon”

... and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean--Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was
it!

"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!"

He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,--"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him--a far, far upward, and inward delight--who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges.

Bertolt Brecht - Motto

2007-02-13T07:24:00.000-05:00

An addendum to yesterday’s post – appropriate, given that this was included as an epigraph in the Svendborg Poems…

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.

Monday Quote Frenzy – Bertolt Brecht

2007-02-12T21:39:00.000-05:00

Brecht’s poem An die Nachgeborenen was written in segments, and eventually published as a whole in 1938, as the final poem in the collection Svendborg Poems. The third section was published separately in Poems in Exile, under the title An die Überlebenden (‘To the Survivors’).

The poem was posted on a bulletin board at the Newark Community Center, where Tom Hayden worked on the Newark Community Union Project, from 1964 to 1968. He was fond of quoting the lines “we/who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness/could not ourselves be friendly” to describe his fellow revolutionaries (Staughton Lynd and Tom Hayden, The Other Side, New American Library, 1967, p. 204; Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, New York: Vintage, 1972, p. 150). In an interview with James Miller in 1985, he recalled it again in talking about the Weathermen (‘Democracy is in the Streets’, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, p. 312.)

This version is taken from Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913 – 1956, edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York: Methuen), 1976. The translation was enough of a group effort that the editors weren’t willing to assign a name.

To Those Born Later

I
Truly, I live in dark times!
The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead
Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet had
The terrible news.

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It is true I still earn my keep
But, believe me, that is only an accident. Nothing
I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I’ve been spared. (If my luck breaks, I am lost.)

They say to me: Eat and drink! Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat
From the starving, and
My glass of water belongs to one dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would also like to be wise.
In the old books it says what wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and to live out
Your brief time without fear
Also to get along without violence
To return good for evil
Not to fulfil your desires but to forget them
Is accounted wise.
All this I cannot do:
Truly, I live in dark times.

II
I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger reigned there.
I came among men in a time of revolt
And I rebelled with
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.

My food I ate between battles
To sleep I lay down among murderers
Love I practiced carelessly
And nature I looked at without patience.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.

All roads led into the mire in my time.
My tongue betrayed me to the butchers.
There was little I could do. But those in power
Sat safer without me: that was my hope.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.

Our forces were slight. Our goal
Lay far in the distance
It was clearly visible, though I myself
Was unlikely to reach it.
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.

III
You who will emerge from the flood
In which we have gone under
Remember
When you speak of our failings
The dark time too
Which you have escaped.

For we went, changing countries oftener than our shoes
Through the wars of the classes, despairing
When there was injustice only, and no rebellion.

And yet we know:
Hatred, even of meanness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

But you, when the time comes at last
And man is a helper to man
Think of us
With forbearance.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Haiku

2007-02-05T16:49:00.000-05:00

Two particular favorites, from the collection of translations by Harold Henderson…

kumo ori-ori
hito-ni yasumuru
tsuki-mi kana

Clouds come from time to time –
and bring to men a chance to rest
from looking at the moon.

– Basho

tsuyu no yo wa
tsuyu no yo nagara
sari nagara

This dewdrop world –
a dewdrop world it is, and still,
although it is…

– Issa

Having just read over the latest IPCC report on global climate change, and recalling a world-weary remark by Hunter Thompson, originally made as he watched North Vietnamese troop roll into Saigon in 1975, I have written a global warming variation on Issa’s dewdrop haiku:

Summer comes and we
Are doomed. Oh yes, doomed. And yet,
We’ve been doomed before.

Web Resources for Global Climate Change

2007-02-03T16:26:00.000-05:00

[I'm posting this here instead of in 16th Street Forum, where it belongs, because I can no longer get into the Blogger dashboard for the other account, and there is no straightforward way to find out what to do about it.]

This post strings together a number of useful links to Web resources on the topic of global climate change and what the individual can do to address it. I note in passing that the phrase ‘global climate change’ is preferred over ‘global warming.’ From the perspective of atmospheric science, what is actually going on is the retention of energy in the global weather system, energy that normally would have leaked out (hence the preferred term of some scientists, ‘global heating’). As a result, there are various predicted effects, such as an increase in the global average surface temperature (‘global warming’, which is of course also a measured effect), an increase in the extremes of weather phenomena, like storms (not yet fully established as a measured effect), and shifts in the long-term weather patterns in various parts of the planet (‘climate change’). So, ‘global climate change’ is kind of a compromise that satisfies most.

Education and Information

There are some good overviews to the science, in addition to what we’ve already seen in An Inconvenient Truth. For example, there are introductions by the Koshland Science Museum, and by the Pew Center. There are also very useful reports prepared by the Congressional Research Service. Unfortunately, these are not generally made available to the public – unless you have good friends in low places, like the Federation of American Scientists, or, for this subject, the National Council for Science and the Environment. Of course, many of the other organizations mentioned below also have explanatory material. (And, many of the sites identified for one resource also have links to other types of resources, so I’ve tried to spread the listings out among the topics.)

At a more advanced level, you might as well go to the scientists actually doing the work. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the UN-sponsored structure in the news this week; their most important products are the Assessment Reports, of which the Third (Climate Change 2001) can be accessed from their publication page. Within the US, the key organization is the US Climate Change Science Program, whose most recent annual report to Congress is only a few months old. In addition, you can get a climate perspective on short term events from the NOAA Climate Prediction Center.

Another useful method for keeping up on current events is to check out what the climate scientists themselves are saying. The prominent group blogs are Real Climate and World Climate Report. Stephen Schneider uses his personal web site as a library of useful documents. For quirkier takes, there’s John Fleck and Ross Gelbspan. For a contrarian (but not knee-jerk skeptical) viewpoint, check out the loyal opposition, the Roger Pielkes, father and son. The best general environmental site covering the news is Grist; you can subscribe to a free daily e-newsletter. And finally, don’t neglect what our own local meteorologists are saying.

There are lots of good books on the subject. My current favorite (because it is the one I’ve read most recently) is The Rough Guide to Climate Change by Robert Henson.

Politics – High Level Actions

There are a lot of activities going on in which individuals can participate. Most immediately, there is the April 14th, National Day of Climate Action, organized by StepItUp2007. And if you don’t want to risk the weather, you can add your signature to the Stop Global Warming Virtual March. Contact your representatives to support the McCain-Lieberman Bill, which is the best thing Congress has to offer so far.

Speaking of Congress, you may want to keep an eye on the daily struggles against obfuscation and inactivity in both legislative and executive branches. Particularly useful for this are Chris Mooney’s blog – he wrote The Republican War on Science, and is bringing out a new book on climate change and hurricanes – and Rick Piltz’s Climate Science Watch – he’s a veteran of both the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the US Climate Change Science Program.

There are plenty of organizations engaged in a range of climate related actions. Greenpeace has an initiative to reduce CO2 emissions by half by 2050. Vote Solar presses actions at federal, state, and local levels. And then there’s the League of Conservation Voters, Project Vote Smart, the Alliance to Save Energy, Environmental Defense, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the American Solar Energy Society, the American Wind Energy Association, the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, and Friends of the Earth.

If that’s not enough, you can find other groups via the World Directory of Environmental Organizations.

Politics – Community Actions

There are several organizations focusing on making a difference at the community level. Closest to home is the Arlington Initiative to Reduce Emissions, which is actually a good model for a county-level activity. It would be good to see things like it in the other DC-area suburbs. Other relevant activities are the US Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement, the US Green Building Council, the Sustainable Buildings Industry Council, and Fresh Energy.

Personal Conservation – General

But what, you ask, can we do to reduce our own feelings of responsibility? (And I guarantee that the more you study this, the more you realize that any civilization has an impact on the earth, and a responsibility to address it, both individually and collectively.) Fortunately, any sufficiently advanced civilization will have Wikipedia; there are two rather good overviews of both individual and political actions for addressing climate change under the headings of Mitigation of Global Warming and Climate Change Response. There are also some handy checklists to follow, prepared by Environmental Defense, Al Gore’s Climate Crisis organization, StopGlobalWarming.org, and Grist.

Personal Conservation – Carbon Calculation

One thing you will want to do is figure out just how bad your personal impact on the environment is, so you can get a sense of how much you have to clean up your act. There are many carbon calculators out there, at StopGlobalWarming.org, Climate Crisis, [SafeClimate], the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, Resurgence, Carbonfund.org, and The Conservation Fund.

Personal Conservation – Optimize Your Home Energy Use

There are two major things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. The first is to improve the energy efficiency of your home. Depending on how bad you are when you start, and how aggressive you are in correcting it, you can reduce your home carbon load by 13 to 18%. You’ll probably want to start by doing an energy audit, following something like the DOE Home Energy Saver. Then nibble away at things; the DOE Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy site provides a good structure and checklist. Don’t be as warm in the winter or as cool in the summer as you have been. Turn down the water heater (both for showers and laundry). Check your insulation, and caulk your windows. There are several comprehensive consumer guides to help out, run by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Consumer Reports, and your friendly neighborhood federal government. Shop green. And change to compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Of course, there are major changes you can make by remodeling and rebuilding. A good starting place is Home Energy, but you’re probably as well off by starting with Google.

Personal Conservation – Optimize Your Transportation

The other really big thing you can do is reduce your driving impact. By cutting back your personal consumption of gasoline, you can cut your carbon load by something like 10%. Ideas? Well, you could walk, ride a bike (check out Commuter Connections, the Arlington Bike Commuting Page, and the Washington Area Bicyclist Association Commuter Mentors), telecommute (DOE has a page on this, but you might also look at articles here and here), or share the car (as in the Arlington Car Sharing Program, or Flexcar). You could get rid of your gas guzzler and buy a less guilt-ridden vehicle, following the advice of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or Yahoo (working with Environmental Defense), or the feds. Don’t forget to maintain it properly. And when you travel, why not rent a hybrid?

Speaking of travel, there are companies that actually work with you to offset your car or plane CO2 output by investing in recovery methods (like planting trees in Brazil). Some are independents, like TerraPass. Some are travel agencies, like Travelocity. And some offer offsets for home use as well, like Climate Care.

Personal Conservation – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

This may not be obvious, but there is a significant carbon impact from making all the packaging that you use, and from getting rid of it when you’re done with it. The typical estimate is that you can reduce your carbon footprint by 5% if you can recycle half your trash. There’s lots of advice on the web about recycling, and about reducing use of grocery bags, etc. One nice site to check out is freecycle, which can also help you deal with that clutter problem.

Personal Conservation – Purchase Green Tags

Needless to say, it would be far better if what energy you used came from renewable sources (sun, wind, wave, geothermal – Aristotle may have been on to something). Much better than burning coal, which is truly demonic from the standpoint of global climate change. But few states allow you to select your power source. Instead, you can buy tradable renewable energy certificates, or ‘green tags.’

Federal law says that, whenever the prices are equal, power suppliers must prefer the renewable source over the nonrenewable. Of course, the prices are never equal, and renewable sources are often not available in your locality. But what counts is the power in the national power grid. If you buy a green tag, that cost gets added to the cost of your nonrenewable power to make it equal to that of a renewable source. That means that, as your local power distributor is giving you evil power, it is committed to purchasing the equivalent amount of good power and putting that into the grid, to be available elsewhere. Another way to think of it is that, for the cost of the green tag, you are providing a discount on the cost of the equivalent amount of renewable power somewhere, so that it will have preference when someone in the vicinity served by that renewable source needs it. You can check into green tags at buyGREEN.net, at the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, at Virginia Interfaith Power and Light, or at the DOE/EPA site.

Green Business and Green Investment

We should not forget that, while the hand of the market may be invisible, the conscience need not be. There are a number of efforts promoting more earth-friendly business activities, including the Social Investment Forum, Ceres, [Safe Climate] for Business, and the Center for Energy & Climate Solutions.

Last Thoughts

Living green can be… interesting. You will need support groups. Keep an eye on TreeHugger Blog, the Green Options Blog (which is getting underway this month), and Global Cool. And drink with like-minded friends; Green Drinks DC is having its inaugural imbibe Tuesday at 6 PM at Zaytinya, at the Gallery Place Metro stop.

A Lucky Find – Blogging from Outside the Walls of Troy

2007-02-02T10:35:00.000-05:00

I’ve been cruising Classics sites, in support of some posts on Thucydides in the sister group blog 16th Street Forum. So doing, I lucked out in stumbling across a blog from the hapless Greek soldier Eurylochus. In post after post, he gives the truth that you may have suspected but never dared discuss about the war, the people (especially Odysseus), and the damned horse. As my daddy used to say, there’s no pleasure quite like epichairekakia.

Sweet!

Monday Quote Frenzy - From the Diary of Samuel Pepys

2007-01-29T10:04:00.000-05:00

Three hundred and forty years later, we still have few that mind anything abstruse and curious.

Up and to the office, and at noon to the Coffeehouse, where I sat with Sir G. Ascue1 and Sir William Petty, who in discourse is, methinks, one of the most rational men that ever I heard speak with a tongue, having all his notions the most distinct and clear, and, among other things (saying, that in all his life these three books were the most esteemed and generally cried up for wit in the world “Religio Medici,” “Osborne’s Advice to a Son,” and “Hudibras”), did say that in these — in the two first principally — the wit lies, and confirming some pretty sayings, which are generally like paradoxes, by some argument smartly and pleasantly urged, which takes with people who do not trouble themselves to examine the force of an argument, which pleases them in the delivery, upon a subject which they like; whereas, as by many particular instances of mine, and others, out of Osborne, he did really find fault and weaken the strength of many of Osborne’s arguments, so as that in downright disputation they would not bear weight; at least, so far, but that they might be weakened, and better found in their rooms to confirm what is there said. He shewed finely whence it happens that good writers are not admired by the present age; because there are but few in any age that do mind anything that is abstruse and curious; and so longer before any body do put the true praise, and set it on foot in the world, the generality of mankind pleasing themselves in the easy delights of the world, as eating, drinking, dancing, hunting, fencing, which we see the meanest men do the best, those that profess it. A gentleman never dances so well as the dancing master, and an ordinary fiddler makes better musique for a shilling than a gentleman will do after spending forty, and so in all the delights of the world almost.

– from Pepys’ diary entry for January 27, 1663/64

The Diary is serialized at http://www.pepysdiary.com.

Monday Quote Frenzy – Keynes on Ideas

2007-01-22T22:31:00.000-05:00

While these concluding remarks from John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) are directed at economics, they can be applied to theoretical systems of all sorts. Indeed, I first encountered them in the context of educational theory.

[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

Hard Advice

2007-01-15T20:50:00.000-05:00

Francine Prose, in How to Read Like a Writer, quotes Isaac Babel on the painful responsibilities of writing:

I go over each sentence, time and again. I start by cutting all the words it can do without. You have to keep your eye on the job because words are very sly, the rubbishy ones go into hiding and you have to dig them out – repetitions, synonyms, things that simply don’t mean anything. … I go over every image, metaphor, comparison, to see if they are fresh and accurate. If you can’t find the right adjective for a noun, leave it alone. Let the noun stand by itself. A comparison must be as accurate as a slide rule, and as natural as the smell of fennel. … I take out all the participles and adverbs I can. … Adverbs are lighter. They can even lend you wings in a way. But too many of them make the language spineless. … A noun needs only one adjective, the choicest. Only a genius can afford two adjectives to one noun. … Line is as important in prose as in an engraving. It has to be clear and hard. … But the most important thing of all … is not to kill the story by working on it. Or else all your labor has been in vain. It’s like walking a tight-rope. Well, there it is. … We ought all to take an oath not to mess up our job.

Monday Quote Frenzy - On Evidence from Torture

2007-01-02T00:14:00.000-05:00

Antiphon of Rhamnus was a professional speech writer in the 5th century BCE. His biography is sufficiently unclear that we don’t even know if he is the same person as Antiphon the Sophist, who wrote an early version of the natural rights theory and got into an argument with Socrates. Much of his business was writing arguments for people in court cases, and some of these have been saved as the Orations. They are available online in both English and Greek on the Perseus classics collection.

The fifth oration was written for a guy named Euxitheus, who was accused of killing a guy named Herodes. As part of the argument, he addressed a custom of ancient criminal investigations: torturing slaves and noncitizens to get testimony.

[29] After I had departed for Aenus and the boat on which Herodes and I had been drinking had reached Mytilene, the prosecution first of all went on board and conducted a search. On finding the bloodstains, they claimed that this was where Herodes had met his end. But the suggestion proved an unfortunate one, as the blood turned out to be that of the animals sacrificed. So they abandoned that line, and instead seized the two men and examined them under torture.

[30] The first, who was tortured there and then, said nothing to damage me. The second was tortured several days later, after being in the prosecution's company throughout the interval. It was he who was induced by them to incriminate me falsely. I will produce witnesses to confirm these facts.

[31] You have listened to evidence for the length of the delay before the man's examination under torture; now notice the actual character of that examination. The slave was doubtless promised his freedom: it was certainly to the prosecution alone that he could look for release from his sufferings. Probably both of these considerations induced him to make the false charges against me which he did; he hoped to gain his freedom, and his one immediate wish was to end the torture.

[32] I need not remind you, I think, that witnesses under torture are biased in favor of those who do most of the torturing; they will say anything likely to gratify them. It is their one chance of salvation, especially when the victims of their lies happen not to be present. Had I myself proceeded to give orders that the slave should be racked for not telling the truth, that step in itself would doubtless have been enough to make him stop incriminating me falsely. As it was, the examination was conducted by men who also knew what their own interests required.

[33] Now as long as he believed that he had something to gain by falsely incriminating me, he firmly adhered to that course; but on finding that he was doomed, he at once reverted to the truth and admitted that it was our friends here who had induced him to lie about me. However, neither his persevering attempts at falsehood nor his subsequent confession of the truth helped him.

[34] They took him, took the man upon whose disclosures they are resting their case against me, and put him to death,1 a thing which no one else would have dreamed of doing. As a rule, informers are rewarded with money, if they are free, and with their liberty, if they are slaves. The prosecution paid for their information with death, and that in spite of a protest from my friends that they should postpone the execution until my return.

Friedrich Solmsen, in his 1975 book Intellectual Experiments of the Greek Enlightenment, says that this is the earliest argument against the use of torture to get evidence. You would think we’d learn by now.

Christmas Quote Frenzy

2006-12-25T11:41:00.000-05:00

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Paul of Tarsus, Letter to the Philippians (4:8)

Monday Quote Frenzy – Louis Brandeis on Freedom of Speech

2006-12-18T22:43:00.000-05:00

From his dissenting opinion in Gilbert v. Minnesota, 254 U.S. 325 (1920):

Full and free exercise of this right by the citizen is ordinarily also his duty; for its exercise is more important to the nation than it is to himself. Like the course of the heavenly bodies, harmony in national life is a resultant of the struggle between contending forces. In frank expression of conflicting opinion lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action; and in suppression lies ordinarily the greatest peril.

From his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927):

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.

(Cross posted from 16th Street Forum)

Monday Quote Extra - 'conspiracy theory'

2006-12-11T20:51:00.000-05:00

John Flower, in today's Guardian Unlimited, points out that the first user of the term 'conspiracy theory', in the sense of "a belief that some covert but influential agency is responsible for an unexplained event", appears to have been Karl Popper. The Oxford English Dictionary, which tries hard to cite the earliest usages for its entries, posted the term in 1997, with the citation

I call it the 'conspiracy theory of society' - the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon.

from Karl Popper's work, The Open Society and its Enemies (the second edition, published in 1952 by Princeton University Press).

I never knew that.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Everyone's a Critic

2006-12-11T20:28:00.000-05:00

Samuel Johnson, in "The Life of Pope", conveys this story told by Alexander Pope about his patron, Lord Halifax:

The famous Lord Halifax was rather a pretender to taste than really possessed of it. – When I had finished the two or three first books of my translation of the Iliad, that Lord desired to have the pleasure of hearing them read at his house. – Addison, Congreve, and Garth, were there at the reading. In four or five places, Lord Halifax stopt me very civilly, and with a speech each time, much of the same kind, 'I beg your pardon, Mr. Pope; but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me. – Be so good as to mark the place, and consider it a little [more] at your leisure. – I'm sure you can give it a little [better] turn.' I returned from Lord Halifax's with Dr. Garth, in his chariot; and, as we were going along, was saying to the Doctor, that my Lord had laid me under a good deal of difficulty by such loose and general observations; that I had been thinking over the passages almost ever since, and could not guess at what it was that offended his Lordship in either of them. Garth laughed heartily at my embarrassment; said, I had not been long enough acquainted with Lord Halifax to know his way yet; that I need not puzzle myself about looking those places over and over, when I got home. 'All you need do (says he) is to leave them just as they are; call on Lord Halifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observations on those passages, and then read them to him as altered. I have known him much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event.' I followed his advice; waited on Lord Halifax some time after; said, I hoped he would find his objections to those passages removed; read them to him exactly as they were at first: and his Lordship was extremely pleased with them, and cried out, 'Ay, now [Mr. Pope] they are perfectly right: nothing can be better.'

This version comes from The Lives of the Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), as edited and reproduced by Jack Lynch, Rutgers University.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Samuel Beckett - Better to Seek

2006-11-27T09:39:00.000-05:00

From Watt:

And yet it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it. The glutton castaway, the drunkard in the desert, the lecher in prison, they are the happy ones. To hunger, thirst, lust, every day afresh and every day in vain, after the old prog, the old booze, the old whores, that's the nearest we'll ever get to felicity, the new porch and the very latest garden. I pass on the tip for what it is worth.

And so do I.

Monday Quote Frenzy – Tarski on Science for Its Own Sake

2006-11-20T17:13:00.000-05:00

I’ve been working through basic texts on the idea of the university. A frighteningly large number of them are titled ‘The Idea of the University’, as if they could not escape the shadow of the original by John Cardinal Newman. (Talk about the anxiety of influence!) Newman’s work delved into a number of topics that are still points of debate, of which one that he is particularly credited with kicking off is the idea that knowledge is worthwhile for its own sake, independent of any worldly use to which it could be put.

The argument tends to focus on the traditional liberal arts, presumably because they are the subjects frequently targeted as useless. The sciences, by contrast, are now considered so very useful that one seldom hears questions about the worth of even those parts farthest from the mundane (such as cosmology and string theory). But does that mean that scientific knowledge is in some fundamental way different from liberal knowledge? Or, should we expect that all other parts of liberal knowledge will eventually make the transition to utility, as have such other former philosophies as psychology and political theory? Or, as I prefer to think, are the sciences fundamentally liberal arts for which additional applications to worldly action have been found or fabricated?

An intriguing assessment of the virtue in treating science as knowledge of value for its own sake was made by the mathematician Alfred Tarski, as he closed out his 1944 article "The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics," published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (vol. 4):

I should like to conclude this discussion with some general and rather loose remarks concerning the whole question of the evaluation of scientific achievements in terms of their applicability. I must confess I have various doubts in this connection.

Being a mathematician (as well as a logician, and perhaps a philosopher of a sort), I have had the opportunity to attend many discussions between specialists in mathematics, where the problem of applications is especially acute, and I have noticed on several occasions the following phenomenon: If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes.

Speaking more seriously, I do not wish to deny that the value of a man's work may be increased by its implications for the research of others and for practice. But I believe, nevertheless, that it is inimical to the progress of science to measure the importance of any research exclusively or chiefly in terms of its usefulness and applicability. We know from the history of science that many important results and discoveries have had to wait centuries before they were applied in any field. And, in my opinion, there are also other important factors that cannot be disregarded in determining the value of a scientific work. It seems to me that there is a special domain of very profound and strong human needs related to scientific research, which are similar in many ways to aesthetic and perhaps religious needs. And it also seems to me that the satisfaction of these needs should be considered an important task of research. Hence, I believe, the question of the value of any research cannot be adequately answered without taking into account the intellectual satisfaction which the results of that research bring to those who understand it and care for it. It may be unpopular and out-of-date to say it -- but I do not think that a scientific result which gives us a better understanding of the world and makes it more harmonious in our eyes should be held in lower esteem than, say, an invention which reduces the cost of paving roads, or improves household plumbing.

Tarski’s full article is available on the Web. I used the version on the Computational Philosophy web site, which was transcribed into hypertext by Andrew Chrucky.

Arendt Centennial

2006-11-16T18:02:00.000-05:00

The November-December 2006 issue of Tikkun includes a tribute to Hannah Arendt on the centenary of her birth. I am somewhat of a fan myself; the epigram to this blog is taken from her essay “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship”. The comments in Tikkun are mostly not interesting to me, as they focus on Arendt as Jew. But the two below were worth reproducing.

Eva Hoffman, one of the greatest of modern Polish writers, highlights the fact that Arendt’s difficulty is rooted in her importance.

Was there ever a thinker less sentimental than Hannah Arendt? Her work has a certain ruthlessness, an uncompromising analytical rigor, which always trumps sympathetic or affective bias. But her severity is consistently deployed in the service of an exacting standard: what she wants from her subjects is a three-dimensional awareness of their “political” situation—that is, the framework of formal relations which defines their public identity and their position as members of a social body. Only from such an awareness, Arendt repeatedly suggests, can a person, or a collective, make truly conscious, truly realistic choices. Arendt underestimated the values of subjectivity, specific attachments, and art. But what she understood powerfully was that the isolated life is not worth living, that we are shaped by our actions and transactions with others, and that we express ourselves most fully as free and equal actors negotiating our place among others, rather than trading on our origins. Between community and solidarity, she chose, always, solidarity. This form of universalism—particularly at a time when we see the dangers of extreme communal sentiments—is very much worth keeping in mind.

Tanya Reinhart is a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University. She draws on one of the essays published in Between Past and Future. The topic comes from her discussion of the moral sense in Socrates, and reappears in other works.

Arendt has been a big inspiration to me, but trying to explain why would take too much space. The easiest thing would be to provide a favorite quote: “Since man contains within himself a partner from whom he can never win release, he will be better off not to live in company with a murderer or a liar. Or, since thought is the silent dialogue carried on between me and myself, I must be careful to keep the integrity of this partner intact; for otherwise, I shall surely lose the capacity for thought altogether”

This concept of the dual self, of thought as conversation between the self and some internal avatar, is very powerful. G. H. Mead develops a version of it in his Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago, 1934), which he calls the ‘generalized other’. In his argument, it is largely a social construct. As C. Wright Mills (of whom more at a later date) describes it, “The structure and contents of selected and subsequently selective social experiences imported into mind constitute the generalized other with which the thinker converses and which is socially limited and limiting.” Mills considered this essential to understanding the social conditioning of rationality.

It is conversing with this internalized organization of collective attitudes that ideas are logically, i.e., implicitly, “tested.” Here they meet recalcitrance and rejection, reformulation and acceptance. Reasoning, as C. S. Peirce has indicated, involves deliberate approval of one’s reasoning. One operates logically (applies standardized critiques) upon propositions and arguments (his own included) from the standpoint of a generalized other. It is from this socially constituted viewpoint that one approves or disapproves of given arguments as logical or illogical, valid or invalid.

The reference is to Collected Papers of Charles Peirce, vol. II, 108, Cambridge, MA, 1934.

What we call illogicality is similar to immorality in that both are deviations from norms. We know that such thought-ways change. Arguments which in the discourse of one group or epoch are accepted as valid, in other times and conversations are not so received. That which was long meditated upon is now brushed aside as illogical. Problems set by one logic are, with a change in interests, outgrown, not solved. The rules of the game change with a shift in interests, and we must accept the dominant rules if we would make an impress upon the profile of thought. Our logical apparatus is formulated by the rebuffs and approvals received from the audiences of our thought. When we converse with ourselves in thought, a generalized other as the carrier of a socially derived logical apparatus restricts and governs the directions of that thought. Although not always the ultimate critique, logical rules serve as an ultimatum for most ideas. Often on this basis are selected out those ideas which will not be spoken, but forgotten; those that will not be experimentally applied, but discarded as incipient hypotheses. … Within the inner forum of reflection, the generalized other functions as a socially derived mechanism through which logical evaluation operates.

The Mills quotes are from ‘Language, Logic and Culture’, which was originally published in American Sociological Review, v. 4, #5, October 1939, and later reprinted in Power, Politics and People, a collection of Mills’ essays edited by Irving Louis Horowitz.

Needless to say, the ‘generalized other’ is a powerful argument for continuing liberal education. A responsible person must take on as a perpetual project the refinement of the self’s ‘other’. The responsible educational system will, at the least, endeavor to provide people with the skills and tools needed to carry out this project.

Monday Quote Frenzy – Søren Kierkegaard

2006-11-13T22:36:00.001-05:00

However much one generation may learn from another, there is one thing it will never be able to learn from its predecessor, and that is the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Its task is the same as that of every previous generation, and it gets no further, unless its predecessor happens to have shirked its duty and deceived itself . . . . No generation has ever learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning, and the task of one generation is never any shorter than that of its predecessors, and if anyone, unlike the preceding generation, should be unwilling to stay with love but wants to go further – then it is nothing but idle and foolish talk. But lots of people find it hard to set aside their belief in universal progress, even in the field of love. “We must keep moving!” they say. “We must go further!” And if their mania for moving forward is typical of the present age, it is also a very old story.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Nothing New Under the Sun

2006-11-06T22:31:00.000-05:00

Had I unknown phrases
Sayings that are strange
Novel, untried words
Free of repetition
Not transmitted sayings
Spoken by the ancestors.
I wring out my body for what it holds,
Sifting through all my words;
For what has been said is just repetition,
What has been said has been said …

The Complaints of Khakheperre-seneb
(Middle Kingdom, 19^th Century BCE)

Monday Quote Frenzy – Beauty in Science

2006-10-23T23:13:00.000-04:00

There has been a lot of complaint recently about the preoccupation of the community of theoretical physicists with the elegances of string theory. Recent books by Lee Smolin (The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next) and Peter Woit (Not Even Wrong The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law) argue that physics departments discriminate in favor of string theorists because of the aesthetic appeal of their mathematics, and in spite of the unlikelihood of their ever obtaining experimental validation. Not surprisingly, Leonard Susskind, one of the developers of the theory, disagrees with the assessment of scientific sterility (The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design), but agrees that beauty plays a significant factor in the theory. Here, then, is a sequence of relevant quotes on the nature of beauty in science.

What's beautiful in science is that same thing that's beautiful in Beethoven. There's a fog of events, and suddenly you see a connection. It expresses a complex of human concerns that goes deeply to you, that connects things that were always in you that were never put together before.

– Victor Weisskopf (Quoted by K.C. Cole in Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life, p. 230)

It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unifying features of a complex of phenomena which present themselves as quite unconnected to the direct experience of the senses.

– Albert Einstein, 1901, letter to Marcel Grossman, (Quoted in E. O. Wilson, Consilience, chapter 1)

[I]t is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment. … It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.

– P. A. M. Dirac (Quoted in S. Chandrasekhar, 1987, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivation in Science, p. 66)

This “shuddering before the beautiful,” this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.

– Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, in Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivation in Science

I don’t know, of course, whether Dirac would think that the mathematics of string theory is sufficiently beautiful to make it likely that it will survive as part of the final laws of physics. He might agree with that, and he might not agree with that, but I don’t think he would disapprove of what we are trying to do.

– Steven Weinberg, 1986 Dirac Memorial Lecture, published as “Towards the final laws of physics”, in Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 61-110.

From the theoretical point of view one would think that [magnetic] monopoles should exist, because of the prettiness of the mathematics. Many attempts to find them have been made, but all have been unsuccessful. One should conclude that pretty mathematics by itself is not an adequate reason for nature to have made use of a theory. We still have much to learn in seeking for the basic principles of nature.

– P. A. M. Dirac, 1981

Don't bother me about your conscientious scruples. After all, the thing is beautiful physics.

– Enrico Fermi (before 1945, quoted in Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1958, p. 11)

Monday Quote Frenzy - Encountering Evil

2006-10-16T09:20:00.000-04:00

Kathleen Norris, in “Native Evil”, published in the Winter 2000 issue of Boston College Magazine:

Any creative encounter with evil requires that we not distance ourselves from it by simply demonizing those who commit evil acts. In order to write about evil, a writer has to try to comprehend it, from the inside out; to understand the perpetrators and not necessarily sympathize with them. But Americans seem to have a very difficult time recognizing that there is a distinction between understanding and sympathizing. Somehow we believe that an attempt to inform ourselves about what leads to evil is an attempt to explain it away. I believe that just the opposite is true, and that when it comes to coping with evil, ignorance is our worst enemy.

This excerpt is quoted by Jessica Stern in her 2003 book Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: HarperCollins, p. xiii).

Tuesday Quote Frenzy - Because Monday was a Holiday

2006-10-10T11:47:00.000-04:00

Richard Feynman, after introducing his subject in QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, pp. 9-10:

So now you know what I’m going to talk about. The next question is, will you understand what I’m going to tell you? … No, you’re not going to be able to understand it. Why, then, am I going to bother you with all this? Why are you going to sit here all this time, when you won’t be able to understand what I am going to say? It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see, my physics students don’t understand it either. That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does. … It’s a problem that physicists have learned to deal with: they’ve learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don’t like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense.

This gives some insight into why the word ‘belief’ is not really appropriate for describing the scientist’s stance towards the world.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Lincoln on Preventive War

2006-10-02T13:06:00.000-04:00

Abraham Lincoln, a freshman Congressman, was quite aggressive in criticizing President Polk in 1848 for the initiation of the Mexican War. Back in Illinois, his law partner, William Herndon, wrote to express concern that he was going too far. Herndon argued that the president must be the “sole judge” of whether it is necessary to engage in a preventive attack. In a letter to Herndon dated 2/15/1848, Lincoln replied:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purposes, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, “I see no probability of the British invading us”; but he will say to you, “Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.”

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter and places our President where kings have always stood.

Further discussion of this may be found in Geoffrey R. Stone's Perilous Times.

Monday Quote Frenzy – Mugwumps

2006-08-21T17:32:00.000-04:00

In the late 1770s, Benjamin Franklin suffered several controversies over his ideas about electricity.

The first started in 1775, when Alessandro Volta carried out a series of experiments with an “electrophore”. The device was a refinement of an invention by Johannes Wilcke, and consisted of a fixed metal plate, a plate of what we would now recognize as non-conducting material, and topped with a rotating, foil-covered wooden shield. Volta showed that both the non-conducting plate and the metal plate became charged, and retained their charges when separated. In Franklin’s original theory, the charge on the metal plate should have decayed away. Franklin was too preoccupied with political events to deal with the problem. Fortunately, a colleague, Jan Ingenhousz, took up the problem, and published an explanation of the effect in the 1779 Philosophical Transactions, showing that Franklin’s electrical fluid theory could explain it if two different fluids (one positive and one negative) were produced in the two plates.

The second controversy centered on lightning rods, then called conductors. Franklin had demonstrated with a series of careful experiments that the charge of conducting rods could be drawn off more easily the more pointed their ends were. He thus recommended that lightning rods would be more efficient with pointed ends. In 1772, when the Board of Ordinance was considering using lightning rods to protect powder storehouses, Franklin made the case for pointed conductors, while Benjamin Wilson (a fellow Fellow of the Royal Society) argued for blunt-ended rods. Franklin won, but Wilson continued to pursue the point. In 1777, the Purfleet gunpowder magazine – equipped with Franklin’s pointed conductors – was struck by lightning. This gave Wilson the opportunity to press his argument, which he did in the same 1779 issue of Philosophical Transactions as Ingenhousz’s article.

Although the Royal Society overwhelmingly took Franklin’s side in the conductor debate, the effect of the two controversies was to make the public skeptical about all of this electrical theorizing. Thus, in a 1779 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine, we find:

[W]hen philosophers thus differ, many will think themselves safest with no conductors at all.

And thus, more than a century before the term was devised, we get mugwumps, in the popular sense of fence-sitters. Flash forward to the present and consider the public stance toward scientific issues of great significance. Global warming? There’s controversy, so it’s safest to ignore it. Teaching evolution? There’s controversy, so it’s safest to teach nothing. We dignify these people by calling them skeptics. But they’re mugwumps the lot of ‘em.

Horace Porter, once an aide to General Grant, later his personal secretary, and even later an executive with the Pullman company and a diplomat, said

A mugwump is a person educated beyond his intellect.

People who have the intellectual engagement to be aware of pseudo-controversies, but lack the intellect to recognize that the evidence for one side has far more weight than the other – those would be your mugwumps.

My appreciation to Joyce Chaplin’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, The First Scientific American, for information about the controversies of the 1770s. My apologies to the authors of the Wikipedia article on mugwumps, who make a strong case that the original Mugwumps were a political movement of substance.

Monday Quote Frenzy – Daniel Webster on the War of 1812

2006-08-14T09:55:00.000-04:00

In the category of déjà vu all over again, we draw attention to the remarks of Daniel Webster, delivered in Congress in 1813, as the war began to turn sour.

Utterly astonished at the declaration of war, I have been surprised at nothing since. … Unless all history deceives me, I saw how it would be prosecuted when I saw how it was begun. There is in the nature of things and unchangeable relation between rash counsels and feeble execution.

(Annals of Congress, 13th Congress, 2nd session, pp. 943-944; as cited by Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, p. 159)

Webster’s dissatisfaction arose in part from the realization that one of the major presumptions of the initial war effort – that the invasion of Canada would be assisted by a substantial number of anti-British Canadians, who would flock to support the American forces, greeting them as liberators – was mostly wishful thinking.

A Historical Note

2006-08-12T23:05:00.000-04:00

Several states (e.g., California and New York) have recently begun initiatives to regulate carbon emissions, thereby taking the initiative against global warming that has not been taken up by the industry-beholden Congress. Those of us who grew up during the battles for civil rights do not normally associate state legislatures with progressive vision. Yet, in the early days of the republic...

In 1792, James Madison (“A Candid State of Parties”, National Gazette, Sept. 26, 1792) was worried about the fledgling Republican party. Why, if the Republicans truly represented the interests of the majority - "the mass of people in every part of the union, in every state, and of every occupation" - why didn’t they win every election? Indeed, why couldn't they get their voters to the polls to turn out the rascally Federalists? Turnout in national elections was only 1 in 4 eligible voters, significantly lower than in state or local elections.

John Taylor (A Definition of Parties; or, The Effects of the Paper System Considered, Philadelphia, 1794) blamed the special interests. With the setting up of Hamilton's Bank of the United States, government securities were available not only for commercial activity, but also for speculation. Those who benefited from paper-based schemes were, according to Taylor, exercising undue influence over the Congress, and (by propaganda and patronage) over the electorate.

It's no wonder they're so good at it; they've had 220 years of practice!

Taylor's manuscript was well circulated in Virginia, and impressed such worthies as Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. They paid particular heed to his recommended solution, which was to encourage the state legislatures to take a more active role in running the country. Of course, that was in a time when state legislatures could exert more control, through the election of senators and the selection of presidential electors.

Nowadays, the linkage is different, but the approach remains sensible. Control of the state legislature means control of redistricting, strong local organization means strong turnout, and so on. Not all politics is local, but the kind we can really have a say in is.

A sidenote: This rumination is rooted in further reading in Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy. I really like this book.

Another sidenote: This is a cross-posting from 16th Street Forum.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Wilentz on Democracy

2006-07-03T22:11:00.000-04:00

I’ve started going through Sean Wilentz’ history of the United States between 1800 and 1860, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, and was struck by this paragraph in the preface:

Democracy appears when some large number of previously excluded, ordinary persons – what the eighteenth century called “the many” – secure the power not simply to select their governors but to oversee the institutions of government, as officeholders and as citizens free to assemble and criticize those in office. Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy. It must always be fought for, by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth, power, and interest. It succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens, and continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible.

Aristotle on Guess Who

2006-05-12T15:12:00.000-04:00

I subscribe to the Wordsmith.org newsletter that provides a word and a quote every weekday. Today’s quote supports the claim that Aristotle has continuing relevance to modern political discourse.

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.

Returned to Life with a Monday Quote

2006-05-01T17:59:00.000-04:00

After many weeks of diversion of attention to serious matters (proposal writing, concert preparation, bleak thoughts of profound depression, etc.), I am attempting to return to the fray.

Having recently finished Simon Blackburn’s Truth: A Guide, I follow his lead of highlighting the 1877 exchange between mathematician William Clifford and psychologist William James, on the ethics of belief. Clifford’s essay and James’ reply are reprinted, together with an analytical essay, in a volume edited by A. J. Burger, who has also graciously preserved the text on the Web.

The passage that drew my attention reminded me of the many arguments I’ve had over the question of why one should care that some people believe dumb things (astrology, UFOs, etc.). Clifford’s response is basically that small stupidities lead to worse, but his analysis why is quite compelling.

He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it; he has committed it already in his heart. If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action.

More Monday Byron

2006-03-27T22:51:00.000-05:00

I have spent much of the last month working on a proposal, and so have neglected this site. To not let it just lie fallow, I return to Byron’s Don Juan.

Canto II shows the cynical Byron at his world-weariest. Thus, verse 4:

Well – well, the world must turn upon its axis,
  And all mankind turn with it, heads or tails,
And live and die, make love and pay our taxes,
  And as the veering wind shifts, shift our sails.
The king commands us, and the doctor quacks us,
  The priest instructs, and so our life exhales,
A little breath, love, wine, ambition, fame,
Fighting, devotion, dust – perhaps a name.

And yet, that name means much to the poet. In Canto IV, verse 106, he notes:

Yet there will still be bards.  Though fame is smoke,
  Its fumes are frankincense to human thought;
And the unquiet feelings, which first woke
  Song in the world, will seek what then they sought.

Back in Canto II, Byron’s advice on getting through it all is blunt. In verse 179:

Man being reasonable must get drunk;
  The best of life is but intoxication.
Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunk
  The hopes of all men and of every nation;
Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk
  Of life’s strange tree, so fruitful on occasion.
But to return.  Get very drunk, and when
You wake with headache, you shall see what then.

Indeed.

Monday with Byron the Blogger

2006-03-13T23:29:00.000-05:00

Hidden away in Canto XIV of Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a verse (the seventh, to be precise) that would be apt in any modern blog.

But what’s this to the purpose, you will say.
  Gent. Reader, nothing, a mere speculation,
For which my sole excuse is, ‘tis my way.
  Sometimes with and sometimes without occasion
I write what’s uppermost without delay.
  This narrative is not meant for narration,
But a mere airy and fantastic basis
To build up common things with commonplaces.

Not far from this, in the sixteenth verse, is an appropriately political entry in which Byron proves that he can craft the kind of blue-state complaint about the current administration that could adorn a modern liberal blog.

With much to excite, there’s little to exalt,
  Nothing that speaks to all men and all times,
A sort of varnish over every fault,
  A kind of commonplace even in their crimes,
Factitious passions, wit without much salt,
  A want of that true nature which sublimes
Whate’er it shows with truth, a smooth monotony
Of character, in those at least who have got any.

Monday Quote Cogitation #2 - Damasio

2006-02-27T16:00:00.000-05:00

Thinking about consciousness… Antonio Damasio has been pitching a theory of consciousness (e.g., in The Feeling of What Happens) grounded in the idea that, when the brain responds to the outside world, it not only maps the phenomenon, but also maps its own response to the phenomenon. The brain tracks all the physiological phenomena of the body – not just sense data, but status of muscles and electrolyte balance and so forth. The brain’s consideration of this basic body state becomes the core sense of self.

In Looking for Spinoza, this idea leads to what strikes me as a physiological basis for the Aristotelian concept of eudaemonia:

[T]here are organism states in which the regulation of life processes becomes efficient, or even optimal, free-flowing and easy. This is a well-established physiological fact. It is not a hypothesis. The feelings that usually accompany such physiologically conducive states are deemed ‘positive,’ characterized not just by absence of pain but by varieties of pleasure. There also are organism states in which life processes struggle for balance and can even be chaotically out of control. The feelings that usually accompany such states are deemed ‘negative,’ characterized not just by absence of pleasure but by varieties of pain.

Monday Quote Cogitation #1 - Searle

2006-02-27T15:42:00.000-05:00

The intelligent design crowd are fond of body components that give the impression of being machines, whose purposes are manifested in their ‘designs’. What would they do with this quote from John Searle, from The Mystery of Consciousness?

I, for one, am always amazed by the specificity of biological systems, and, in the case of the brain, the specificity takes a form you could not have predicted just from knowing what it does. If you were designing an organic machine to pump blood you might come up with something like a heart, but if you were designing a machine to produce consciousness, who would think of a hundred billion neurons?

Tuesday Quote Extra - Depravity and Bullshit

2006-02-21T16:49:00.000-05:00

In the context of yesterday’s extended quote from Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, it is interesting to note this quote from Voltaire:

Plus les moeurs sont dépravés, plus les expressions deviennent mesurées; on croit regagner en langage ce qu’on a perdu en vertu.

This is one of two quotes from Voltaire inserted by Byron in the Preface to Cantos VI-VIII of Don Juan. In my Penguin edition, it is translated as:

The more depraved our conduct it, the more guarded words become; we believe we can regain with words what we have lost in character.

Byron was responding to charges of blasphemy (and worse) leveled against the earlier Cantos. But it is worth considering that Voltaire anticipated nicely the psychology of the bullshitter.

Monday Quote Frenzy - Bullshit

2006-02-20T21:47:00.000-05:00

Sigh. Another cussword, driving up my sluttiness quotient.

Harry Frankfurt's little black book, On Bullshit, has been out for about a year, with surprisingly little play in the blogs that I read, so I thought I would include the excerpts that struck me as most important - which for me were all near the end. For those unfamiliar with the book, it is in fact a repackaging of an article that Frankfurt did originally as a contribution to a 1986 seminar series at Yale. He published it in The Raritan Review, and collected it with other essays in his 1988 book The Importance of What We Care About.
Ian Malcolm, an editor at Princeton University Press, decided to republish it to bring it to a wider audience. Frankfurt talked about the origin of the essay with the New York Times on Feb. 14, 2005; Malcolm described the republication in a comment at Crooked Timber the following day.

The definition of bullshit is precise:

[A] statement … grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.

and

This is the crux of the distinction between [the bullshitter] and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.

The dangers of bullshit are similarly clear:

Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost.

and

[The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Why is there so much bullshit? Could be politics; could be 24-hour news networks; could be talk shows (radio or TV); could be blogs.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.

When you remember that this essay was written in 1986, its prediction of the degraded standards of modern public life is depressingly perfect – although he attributes it to a loss of confidence in notions of objectivity.

One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

And that, of course, is the final irony.

As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial – notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

Monday Quote Frenzy – Byron

2006-02-13T22:16:00.000-05:00

Lord Byron’s dedicatory stanzas in Don Juan are a fierce attack on poet laureate Robert Southey and other gentlemanly romantics (especially Wordsworth). Any reading of stanzas 12 to 15 that conveys a modern political interpretation is purely… delightful.

Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant!
  Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin’s gore,
And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
  Transferred to gorge upon a sister shore,
The vulgarest tool that tyranny could want,
  With just enough of talent and no more,
To lengthen fetters by another fixed
And offer poison long already mixed.

An orator of such set trash of phrase,
  Ineffably, legitimately vile,
That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise,
  Nor foes – all nations – condescend to smile.
Not even a sprightly blunder’s spark can blaze
  From that Ixion grindstone’s ceaseless toil,
That turns and turns to give the world a notion
Of endless torments and perpetual motion.

A bungler even in its disgusting trade,
  And botching, patching, leaving still behind
Something of which its masters are afraid,
  States to be curbed and thoughts to be confined,
Conspiracy or congress to be made,
  Cobbling at manacles for all mankind,
A tinkering slave-maker, who mends old chains,
With God and man’s abhorrence for its gains.

If we may judge of matter by the mind,
  Emasculated to the marrow, it
Hath but two objects, how to serve and bind,
  Deeming the chain it wears even men may fit,
Eutropius of its many masters, blind
  To worth as freedom, wisdom as to wit,
Fearless, because no feeling dwells in ice;
Its very courage stagnates to a vice.

Piss Christ and the Mohammed Cartoons

2006-02-12T22:34:00.001-05:00

Sigh. I used the word ‘piss’. That’s bound to get this blog put on the naughty list. But it can’t be helped.

I’ve thought about the merits of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine – Serrano’s own urine, in fact – for some time. The photo’s public prominence as a supposed example of liberal art gone wild was cemented by Senator Alphonse D'Amato, when he tore up a copy in the chambers of the U.S. Senate on May 18, 1989. But recent allusions to it in discussions of the publication of cartoons ridiculing Mohammed have prompted me to go public with what may be a difficult interpretation.

Fundamentally (alas, an adverb that carries too much freight these days), I think that Piss Christ is a profound statement of Christian belief.

As an example of how it is perceived these days, here is Anne Applebaum in the February 8 Washington Post. (A free subscription is required, and is only good for going back a few weeks; after that, they want cash from researchers.) Applebaum is listing the issues that she thinks have been pushed into public view by the cartoon controversy.

Hypocrisy of the cultural left. Dozens of American newspapers, including The Post, have stated that they won't reprint the cartoons because, in the words of one self-righteous editorial, they prefer to "refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols." Fair enough -- but is this always true? An excellent domestic parallel is the fracas that followed the 1989 publication of "Piss Christ," a photograph of Christ on a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine. That picture -- a work of art that received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts -- led to congressional denunciations, protests and letter-writing campaigns.

At the time, many U.S. newspapers that refused last week to publish the Danish cartoons -- the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe (but apparently not The Post) -- did publish "Piss Christ." The photographer, Andres Serrano, enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame, even appearing in a New York Times fashion spread. The picture was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and elsewhere. The moral: While we are nervous about gratuitously offending believers in distant, underdeveloped countries, we don't mind gratuitously offending believers at home.

Now I’m not interested right now in what debates went on at the L. A. Times and the Boston Globe. The question is whether Piss Christ really is a bad-boy stunt intended solely to shock and offend, based on the adolescent presumption that the only good art is offensive. I suggest that there are three issues we need to investigate before we come to that assessment: (1) What are the purely aesthetic values of the work? (2) What significant meaning can we derive from the work? (3) What did the artist say about his intentions?

Aesthetic Quality: It is hard to appreciate the aesthetic impact of the photograph based on the sort of reproduction that we can post here. The original was large (60 inches by 40 inches), and glossy. The colors are saturated. If I didn’t know that the crucifix was in urine, I would be struck by the subtle golden hue of the crucifix seen against a red backdrop, the gauzy lack of focus that makes the image dreamlike, and the clear illumination from above, as if a single sunbeam had penetrated the storm to do homage. If there were no title, no information on how the image was produced, it would not be offensive. I doubt that I would find reason to revisit it the way I do major works, but I am glad to have seen it.

Significant Meaning: As I said above, the loss of focus suggests an event recalled at a distance, in memory or dream. That would be a reasonable, if not subtle, interpretation. But of course, the question is what meaning I derive from the fact that the golden glow comes from light filtering through urine?

The standard reaction is that it is disgusting. But why? Why is human urine disgusting? Clearly, we have strong cultural feelings against urine. I suppose many cultures do, although I’ve not researched it. But what do cultural stances have to do with the crucifix, which represents Christ’s sacrifice of himself for our sins? Not being repelled by urine is not a sin; urologists go to heaven too. And remember that Christ’s sacrifice is unlimited in its effect. Only those who turn from his offer are not supposed to be saved, and I gather that there is even debate about the permanence of their exclusion.

Think of this another way: Christ is willing to get into our beings no matter how repugnant our sins are. A carafe of urine – which is, after all, a natural product of our bodies – is not in the same category of vileness as sin. So why shouldn’t Christ be in the urine? Could there be some natural substance that could repel Christ? I can’t see how Christian doctrine could accept that.

So, the meaning I take from Serrano’s picture is that Christ is willing to go places where we aren’t. That his love transcends mundane concepts of ugliness. That the perfection of his sacrifice is far greater than any sacrifices we are willing to make, because it is extended everywhere and to everyone. This strikes me as a profound statement of Christian belief.

This sort of reaction is not just mine. For example, Leo Steinberg, in The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and In Modern Oblivion, puts Serrano is a tradition of artists coping with the humanity of the incarnation. In a review in oldSpeak, Joshua Anderson talks to Steinberg’s interpretation of the display of Christ’s genitalia, mostly in his baby pictures.

The emphasis on Christ’s sex, he writes, is meant to underscore his biblical humanity. Indeed, the paradoxical nature of Christ’s incarnation, his simultaneous divinity and humanity, has always existed in tension throughout Christian history… Displaying the masculinity of Christ was not the only way the artists instructed their audiences—Steinberg also shows paintings where the Christ Child stares out from the painting while nursing on the Madonna’s fully displayed breast, and others which focus on the circumcision of the infant Messiah. “Look,” the Renaissance artists seem to be saying to us, "consider the mystery and wonder of the Incarnation. See how the God-child’s body is like a man’s in every way. See how he suckles at his mother’s breast. See how he bawls when his blood is shed.”

In talking of Serrano’s message, Anderson says:

Serrano must have known that he was speaking a particular cultural language by mixing urine and Christ, one that was certainly intended to offend. So, although the righteous indignation of evangelicals is certainly justified, if one can look past the obvious mockery of Christ, there is, ironically, a subtle (and almost certainly unwitting) affirmation of the profoundly good news of the Incarnation… In contrast, Serrano’s mixture of Christ and urine is offensive, but not unbiblical, unless one holds to the Gnostic belief that Jesus was not completely human; indeed bodily functions are necessitated by concept of “the Word made flesh.”

In reality, the offensiveness of Piss Christ is due at least somewhat to the patently unbiblical nature of much current Christian art. That is, the submersion of Christ in a jar of urine is offensive to evangelicals at least partly because the humiliation and scandal of the Incarnation is, in practical terms, typically ignored in contemporary evangelical art.… Serrano provides an accurate understanding of the reality of the incarnate God; in his overt attempt at mockery, he establishes an important contrast to the candy-coated Christ found in most Christian bookstores.

Elissa, in animated marginalia, makes a similar point:

Do we really believe that God became man and participated in all the disgusting, filthy, and thoroughly human stuff that makes up our daily existence? If so, if we do believe in a humiliated Christ, then Serrano's work can actually become convicting... even devotional. God Incarnate means God wallowing in our waste. What if this image was not an attack on our faith, but a challenge to those who claim it? What if we failed? What if we, too, have a history of refusing an insulted Savior?

And, in part of a very dense, deconstructist assessment in Arts & Opinion, Damien Casey writes:

God's place is with the abject every bit as much as it is on the high altar of the cathedral. Yes, the crucifix as a triumphant symbol is a delicious irony in keeping with the spirit of the gospels. But that irony is lost when we forget its strong association with both ignominy and abjection. Then it merely becomes a sign of domination.

Serrano’s Intentions: I think that there is little or no direct evidence that Serrano produced Piss Christ purely for its offensive effect. Serrano was not been very forthcoming about his motivation in producing the piece, preferring to let the discussion proceed without him. Eventually, though, he wrote an open letter to the NEA. In an excerpt published by animated marginalia, he says:

The photograph, and the title itself, are ambiguously provocative but certainly not blasphemous. Over the years, I have addressed religion regularly in my art. My Catholic upbringing informs this work which helps me to redefine and personalize my relationship with God. My use of such bodily fluids as blood and urine in this context is parallel to Catholicism's obsession with "the body and blood of Christ." It is precisely in the exploration and juxtaposition of the symbols from which Christianity draws it strength.

Amy Peterson, at Drexel University, reported that the work was well within the context of Serrano’s other photos:

Some of his earlier works were quite abstract, involving the mixing of blood, milk, and urine. Serrano feels that these works are important because they were "going against the grain of photography in the sense that there's no perspective or spatial relationships. There's a flatness of color and material and subject matter."

As he progressed, he began to place objects he would find at flea markets in the bodily fluids. These photographs include Piss Mary, Piss Christ, and Piss Last Supper, in which statues of Mary, Christ, and Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" were immersed in urine.

Serrano contends that his work Piss Chris would not have caused as much controversy if it weren't for the title. He claims that he meant no disrespect. However, he titled the piece in the same manner that he titled all of the works of the period: a description of the object seen as well as the liquid it was submerged in.

Bill Seeley, in a review in Metapsychology of Cynthia Freeland’s But Is It Art?, notes that

Serrano contends that the work was not intended to denounce religion, but rather to point to the manner in which contemporary culture is commercializing and cheapening Christian icons.

And finally, in an interview with Coco Fusco, in the Fall 1991 issue of High Performance magazine, Serrano says:

My work has social implications, it functions in a social arena. In relation to the controversy over Piss Christ, I think the work was politicized by forces outside it, and as a result, some people expect to see something recognizably "political" in my work. I am still trying to do my work as I see fit, which I see as coming from a very personal point of view with broader implications.

So, dragging Piss Christ into the debate over the Danish Mohammed cartoons, as a putative example of how it’s OK to bash Christian symbols in the liberal West, ignores the evidence of aesthetics, meaning, and intent, that it is legitimate art.

Monday Quote

2006-01-16T14:41:00.000-05:00

Marcel Proust, quoted in Marc Edmundson’s Why Read?:

The mediocre usually imagine that to let ourselves be guided by the books we admire robs our faculty of judgment of part of its independence. ‘What can it matter to you what Ruskin feels: feel for yourself.’ Such a view rests on a psychological error which will be discounted by all those who have accepted a spiritual discipline and feel thereby that their power of understanding and of feeling is infinitely enhanced, and their critical sense never paralyzed… There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our own thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with his.

Gearing Up for the Brain-God Wars

2006-01-12T16:15:00.000-05:00

Today’s Nature includes a letter that visits a topic on which I have posted previously. Under the headline “Neuroscience gears up for duel on the issue of brain versus deity”,
Kenneth S. Kosik, of the Neuroscience Research Institute at UC Santa Barbara says we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

The argument over evolution versus intelligent design, discussed in … “Day of judgement for intelligent design” (Nature 438, 267; 2005), is a relatively small-stakes theological issue compared with the potential eruption in neuroscience over the material nature of the mind.

Siding with evolution does not really pose a serious problem for many deeply religious people, because one can easily accept evolution without doubting the existence of a non-material being. On the other hand, the truly radical and still maturing view in the neuroscience community that the mind is entirely the product of the brain presents the ultimate challenge to nearly all religions.

The slow ramping up of this debate, from Descartes’ dualism in the seventeenth century to the neurophilosopher materialists’ claims of victory today, is about to spill over from an esoteric mind–brain debate to the divisive question of whether a product of the mind, such as God, can have any traditionally valid existence whatsoever.

The debate becomes whether a deity, on one hand, stems from human imagination or biological drive or, on the other hand, has an authentic existence that the brain has evolved to perceive.

I was wondering about this just last night, in the context of thinking about sacred texts, which are often said to be written from direct revelation. It can be a complicated topic. For example, Catholics distinguish revelation (spiritual communication of truth) from inspiration (spiritual illumination to encourage or enable the mind to conceive truth) and divine assistance (spiritual prevention from making incorrect choices, the presumed source of papal inerrancy). But in all variations, there must be some point of interaction between the spiritual world of God and the physical world of the mind. How can this be anything but problematical dualism, with all the troubles accruing thereto?

Kosik continues:

The reappearance of dualism brings back dusty old memories of long-ago battles that may now need to be refought. As we saw from the media ruckus raised by the Dalai Lama’s address to November’s Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington DC (even if this did turn down to a rather low simmer on site), the potential for impassioned disagreement exists.

The matter now stands at an intellectual impasse, waiting for an issue around which polarized views will crystallize. We can expect some heady days.

Indeed.

Monday Quote Frenzy - The Difficulty of Writing

2006-01-09T23:35:00.000-05:00

Having just finished James Shapiro’s superb A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare – 1599, and being unable to finish anything else today, I have drawn two Elizabethan comments cited by Shapiro, on the difficulty of getting it down.

First, Shakespeare, from The Rape of Lucrece, on the problem of having too much to say:

First hovering o’er the paper with her quill:
Conceit and grief an eager combat fight;
What wit sets down is blotted straight with will;
This is too curious-good, this blunt and ill:
Much like a press of people at a door,
Throng her inventions, which shall go before.

Then, Ben Jonson, on Shakespeare’s talent as an editor on deadline:

Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses’ anvil; turn the same,
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,
For a good poet’s made as well as born.
And such wert thou.

Hold the Fort

2006-01-05T09:29:00.000-05:00

ArXiv is where every physicist goes first thing in the morning. Originally hosted at Los Alamos, and now at Cornell, arXiv posts electronic versions of preprints in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology. There’s a lot that could be said about the whole issue of electronic publication and prepublication (pre peer review) distribution; there are some good discussions about this already posted at arXiv itself. The Wikipedia-ish aspect that I want to highlight here is that submissions are essentially unedited. Only the most obviously crazy stuff is weeded out; the more sublimely insane is there for all to read.

On Tuesday morning, there appeared astro-ph/0601022, “The red rain phenomenon of Kerala and its possible extraterrestrial origin”, by Godfrey Louis and A. S. Kumar, of Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, India. The manuscript says it has been accepted for publication in the journal Astrophysics and Space Science, which is one of the many Springer Science+Business Media scientific journals. I quote the abstract in full:

A red rain phenomenon occurred in Kerala, India starting from 25th July 2001, in which the rainwater appeared coloured in various localized places that are spread over a few hundred kilometers in Kerala. Maximum cases were reported during the first 10 days and isolated cases were found to occur for about 2 months. The striking red colouration of the rainwater was found to be due to the suspension of microscopic red particles having the appearance of biological cells. These particles have no similarity with usual desert dust. An estimated minimum quantity of 50,000 kg of red particles has fallen from the sky through red rain. An analysis of this strange phenomenon further shows that the conventional atmospheric transport processes like dust storms etc. cannot explain this phenomenon. The electron microscopic study of the red particles shows fine cell structure indicating their biological cell like nature. EDAX analysis shows that the major elements present in these cell like particles are carbon and oxygen. Strangely, a test for DNA using Ethidium Bromide dye fluorescence technique indicates absence of DNA in these cells. In the context of a suspected link between a meteor airburst event and the red rain, the possibility for the extraterrestrial origin of these particles from cometary fragments is discussed.

I know that Charles Fort is not forgotten, because Wikipedia, as usual, has an excellent article on him. I first encountered him via his great work Lo!, originally published in 1931. He had been a journalist of sorts and an almost entirely unpublished novelist, but his fame rests on the results of his spending the last 30-odd years of his life in the British Museum and the New York Public Library, collecting odd reports from newspapers and journals. These reports were of such things as a shower of frogs in Nevada; a shower of eels in Alabama; a rain of brown worms in Indiana and, ten days later, a rain of red worms in Massachusetts; a shower of snails in Cornwall; a rain of blood California; deluges of nails in Texas and of periwinkles in Worcester. And so forth.

Fort seemed to be having fun, irritating what he felt were the humorless and dogmatic priests of science with his casual attitude toward verification and the outlandishness of his hypotheses. For example, he suggested that rains of toads and such came from a vast “Sargasso Sea of space.” Not surprisingly, alas, he gained adherents, like Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, and Tiffany Thayer. Thayer (also a novelist) formed the Fortean Society so that, after Fort’s death, his fans could become the same kind of earnest, humorless drones that he’d lampooned. One of the Fortean Society’s better known members was Kenneth Arnold. Remember? 1947? Flying ‘saucers’?

So red rain is pretty much worth a footnote in Fort’s book. In fact, it may well have been. At least, William Corliss, who has carried on the Fortean project, notes a report of a red rain in Naples, Italy, that occurred in 1818. (Sorry, his 1974 book Strange Phenomena is out of print.)

The original reports of the Kerala red rain appeared mostly in the Indian press, although the BBC carried one story. Interestingly, the BBC reported that rains of other colors (green, yellow, brown, black) followed the red rains. The Centre for Earth Science Studies (CESS) at Thiruvananthapuram first suggested that a bolide (a meteor exploding in the upper atmosphere) triggered the rain. Then, after analyzing samples of the rainwater, they reported that a filtered precipitate showed various elements — including carbon, silicon, calcium, magnesium, aluminum, iron, sodium and potassium, as well as significant traces (in parts per million) of phosphorus, titanium, chromium, manganese, copper and nickel – and more surprisingly, a red-colored cell structure that they tentatively identified as spores of some species of fungus.

Louis and Kumar took it from there. They produced two papers in 2003 (here and here, again with thanks to arXiv) that the precipitate was composed of the resting spores of an extreme hyperthermophilic microbe, which had been delivered by comet to the stratosphere above Kerala. They argued that the spores were similar to those identified in interstellar clouds by Chandra Wickramasinghe and colleagues.

Wickramasinghe has been in the news off and on, perhaps most prominently because of his testimony at the 1981 Arkansas creationism trial. For some reason, he was called as a creationist witness, even though it was his belief that life was not created on earth but rather deposited from space (the venerable panspermia concept). He and Fred Hoyle wrote a book in 1981 called Evolution From Space (also out of print), in which they argued that influenza epidemics were triggered by cometary depositions. (A good library may have the March 1999 issue of Astrophysics and Space Science, vol. 268, pp. 1-382, which is devoted to papers on the Hoyle and Wickramasinghe panspermia hypothesis.) Some of their evidence involved apparent similarities of infrared and ultraviolet spectra of microbial spores to spectra measured towards objects in interstellar clouds. This was very thoroughly debunked at the time; I have the references in a box somewhere.

Neither of the 2003 papers was apparently published, but their latest variation has, as we have seen, finally gotten through the referees – in the same journal that featured Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. This is a little surprising, as there has been general agreement elsewhere that the phenomenon was due to nothing more than an admixture of dust from the Arabian Gulf region. (Kerala is on the coast of the Arabian Sea.) The possibility of such an explanation was raised almost immediately by other scientists on the scene, such as seismologist V. K. Gaur. Later studies of satellite and lidar data, carried out by folks from the Vikram Sarabai Space Centre, also in Thiruvananthapuram, confirmed that the cause was a dust cloud that originated in the gulf countries. They published this result in the January 2004 issue of Aerosol Science and Technology.

Louis and Kumar dispute this interpretation, mostly because of their analysis of the particles in the rainwater samples. The particles show little structure reminiscent of biological cells – they have very thick outer layers, no nuclei, and only show disorganized internal clutter under electron microscopy. They show no evidence of DNA. Yet Louis and Kumar insist that they look like cells, and so that must trump the rest of the evidence. The reader can check for herself; their preprint includes lots of images from their tests.

Of course, there was little to no control over the taking of the rain samples. Dr. Gaur, who was in the region studying the collapse of a number of wells to check for possible seismic activity, addressed that point when asked about wells that were supposedly yielding red water.

I can only speculate on what has happened in these regions where the wells have opened up, but I think my speculation maybe quite accurate. There must have been a topsoil of laterite [an iron oxide]. Below it, there is soluble material that has gone down and formed clay. If you go deeper and deeper, you will find other materials… Rainwater would have flowed easily down through the laterite layers until it encountered the clay layer, where it would have got blocked. This accumulation of water over the years would have created a great pressure, weakened those walls… There is so much human activity that can also cause [weakening]. People use laterite for bricks. If the clay layer is exposed, the clay layer itself may crumble and cave in. It may look like a well.

This is all pure speculation. To be sure that this is exactly what happened, somebody must give us exact data. This question was also asked in the committee that I head to study earthquake management. I told them that there was nothing much we could make out because all the evidence we had been given so far was purely anecdotal.

If we had even a clear soil profile, we could have come up with some conclusions. We could have put some numbers on it if we had had a good sample of the soil. We could have put these numbers together and said how much pressure had built up. But this was not done. I think this was most irresponsible.

There are so many competent people in Kerala. The government could have asked any of them to do this. This should be done before we draw any conclusions. Instead you have someone coming up with a bucket of soil saying that he collected it from a red well. You do not know what else was in that bucket before the soil went into it. How can you draw any scientific conclusions? You can only speculate.

As usual, we are left with Tom Paine’s question: “is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?” What is more likely: That Louis and Kumar are at least overrunning the evidence, treating their rain samples as uncompromised and incontestable data, and that the red rain was just contaminated by windblown desert dust? Or that space bugs fell on Kerala?

In assessing the probabilities, one might want to note that the impact of desert dust blown over long distances has been addressed for some time, at least since Charles Darwin’s 1846 paper in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London (vol. 2, p. 26). An article in the April 10, 1902, issue of Nature, applies this explanation to a variety of red rains in Europe. As quoted 99 years later in the April 11, 2001, issue (3 months before the Kerala red rain!):

The “red rain” which fell in many parts of Italy and extended as far as Vienna and other central European stations on the evening of March 10, 1901, has been subsequently studied by Prof. N. Passerini, and an account of the phenomena is now given by him in the Bolletino mensuale of the Italian Meteorological Society. The phenomenon appears to have travelled slowly from south to north… Prof. Passerini found that the precipitation of the earthy substance was accompanied with very little rain, and a rough analysis showed it to contain about 44 per cent. of fine sand, 32 per cent. of argillaceous matter, 12 per cent. of calcareous matter and about 10 per cent. of organic and volatile substances destroyed by calcination. The red colour was probably due to ferric hydrate… It is suggested that the material deposited in this and other so-called “rains of blood” that have occurred at different times in Italy may probably have been transported by a cyclonic disturbance, and may have had its origin in the equatorial regions of Africa or America.

Other episodes of red rain (and red snow), similarly analyzed, are discussed in Clement et al., 1972, La Météorologie (Paris) (vol. 24, p. 65); Bücher and Lucas, 1975, La Météorologie (Paris) ( vol. 33, p. 53); and Prodi and Fea 1979, Journal of Geophysical Research C (vol. 84, p. 6951). None of these authors found evidence of extraterrestrial microbes.

One closing thought. Charles Fort was always good for a quote; his Wikipedia entry includes a fun question to toss into the intelligent design ‘debate’:

If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?

Monday Quote Frenzy - Bertrand Russell

2006-01-02T22:25:00.000-05:00

Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of truth.

The kind of arch remark one expects from arch-skeptic Bertrand Russell. This one comes from a brief work (only a few dozen pages) called An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, which appeared in 1943. While not generally available these days, it has provided one quotation that turns up in many anthologies:

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

I thought that was a particularly relevant comment for the War on Terror, and wanted to put it in context. Fortunately, a big excerpt from the book has been posted on the Web, and I have extracted from that the parts that particularly interested me.

Russell focuses in particular on the platitude “human nature cannot be changed” and the variously dangerous ways in which governments exploit it. In particular:

There is one peculiarly pernicious application of the doctrine that human nature cannot be changed. This is the dogmatic assertion that there will always be wars, because we are so constituted that we feel a need of them.

It is quite striking that Russell was publishing a work that was both pacifist and deeply suspicious of all government while World War II was still under way and its outcome still in doubt. It is also fascinating, and somewhat depressing, to see how much is relevant to our own times.

I am persuaded that there is absolutely no limit to the absurdities that can, by government action, come to be generally believed. Give me an adequate army, with power to provide it with more pay and better food than falls to the lot of the average man, and I will undertake, within thirty years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the State. Of course, even when these beliefs had been generated, people would not put the kettle in the ice-box when they wanted it to boil. That cold makes water boil would be a Sunday truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life. What would happen would be that any verbal denial of the mystic doctrine would be made illegal, and obstinate heretics would be "frozen" at the stake. No person who did not enthusiastically accept the official doctrine would be allowed to teach or to have any position of power. Only the very highest officials, in their cups, would whisper to each other what rubbish it all is; then they would laugh and drink again. This is hardly a caricature of what happens under some modern governments.

The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that governments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the causes of our misfortunes. There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship. Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm. If all governments taught the same nonsense, the harm would not be so great. Unfortunately each has its own brand, and the diversity serves to produce hostility between the devotees of different creeds. If there is ever to be peace in the world, governments will have to agree either to inculcate no dogmas, or all to inculcate the same. The former, I fear, is a Utopian ideal, but perhaps they could agree to teach collectively that all public men, everywhere, are completely virtuous and perfectly wise. Perhaps, when the war is over, the surviving politicians may find it prudent to combine on some such programme.

Not content to rant, Russell also offers some useful rules by which we might ease our pain.

To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.

If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet. Aristotle, however, was less cautious. Ancient and medieval authors knew all about unicorns and salamanders; not one of them thought it necessary to avoid dogmatic statements about them because he had never seen one of them.

Many matters, however, are less easily brought to the test of experience. If, like most of mankind, you have passionate convictions on many such matters, there are ways in which you can make yourself aware of your own bias. If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.

He also recommends an approach that Cassirer says was favored by Kant. In a 1771 letter to Marcus Herz, Kant said:

You know that I examine reasonable criticisms, not merely as to how they might be refuted, but also upon reflection I always weave them into my judgments and allow them to overthrow all preconceived opinions that I have previously cherished. In this way I always hope to look at my judgments impartially, from the standpoint of someone else, so as to derive a third view which is better than the one I had.

Similarly, Russell says:

For those who have enough psychological imagination, it is a good plan to imagine an argument with a person having a different bias. This has one advantage, and only one, as compared with actual conversation with opponents; this one advantage is that the method is not subject to the same limitations of time or space. Mahatma Gandhi deplores railways and steamboats and machinery; he would like to undo the whole of the industrial revolution. You may never have an opportunity of actually meeting any one who holds this opinion, because in Western countries most people take the advantage of modern technique for granted. But if you want to make sure that you are right in agreeing with the prevailing opinion, you will find it a good plan to test the arguments that occur to you by considering what Gandhi might say in refutation of them. I have sometimes been led actually to change my mind as a result of this kind of imaginary dialogue, and, short of this, I have frequently found myself growing less dogmatic and cocksure through realizing the possible reasonableness of a hypothetical opponent.

Be very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem. Both men and women, nine times out of ten, are firmly convinced of the superior excellence of their own sex. There is abundant evidence on both sides. If you are a man, you can point out that most poets and men of science are male; if you are a woman, you can retort that so are most criminals. The question is inherently insoluble, but self esteem conceals this from most people. We are all, whatever part of the world we come from, persuaded that our own nation is superior to all others. Seeing that each nation has its characteristic merits and demerits, we adjust our standard of values so as to make out that the merits possessed by our nation are the really important ones, while its demerits are comparatively trivial. Here, again, the rational man will admit that the question is one to which there is no demonstrably right answer. It is more difficult to deal with the self esteem of man as man, because we cannot argue out the matter with some non-human mind. The only way I know of dealing with this general human conceit is to remind ourselves that man is a brief episode in the life of a small planet in a little corner of the universe, and that, for aught we know, other parts of the cosmos may contain beings as superior to ourselves as we are to jellyfish.

Other passions besides self-esteem are common sources of error; of these perhaps the most important is fear. Fear sometimes operates directly, by inventing rumors of disaster in war-time, or by imagining objects of terror, such as ghosts; sometimes it operates indirectly, by creating belief in something comforting, such as the elixir of life, or heaven for ourselves and hell for our enemies. Fear has many forms - fear of death, fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of the herd, and that vague generalized fear that comes to those who conceal from themselves their more specific terrors. Until you have admitted your own fears to yourself, and have guarded yourself by a difficult effort of will against their mythmaking power, you cannot hope to think truly about many matters of great importance, especially those with which religious beliefs are concerned. Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life.

This, then, is the context in which that famous quote appears:

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. So it was in the French Revolution, when dread of foreign armies produced the reign of terror. And it is to be feared that the Nazis, as defeat draws nearer, will increase the intensity of their campaign for exterminating Jews. Fear generates impulses of cruelty, and therefore promotes such superstitious beliefs as seem to justify cruelty. Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. And for this reason poltroons are more prone to cruelty than brave men, and are also more prone to superstition. When I say this, I am thinking of men who are brave in all respects, not only in facing death. Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one. Obloquy is, to most men, more painful than death; that is one reason why, in times of collective excitement, so few men venture to dissent from the prevailing opinion. No Carthaginian denied Moloch, because to do so would have required more courage than was required to face death in battle.

Perhaps the world would lose some of its interest and variety if such beliefs were wholly replaced by cold science. Perhaps we may allow ourselves to be glad of the Abecedarians, who were so-called because, having rejected all profane learning, they thought it wicked to learn the ABC. And we may enjoy the perplexity of the South American Jesuit who wondered how the sloth could have traveled, since the Flood, all the way from Mount Ararat to Peru - a journey which its extreme tardiness of locomotion rendered almost incredible. A wise man will enjoy the goods of which there is a plentiful supply, and of intellectual rubbish he will find an abundant diet, in our own age as in every other.

The site where this extended excerpt appears is devoted to panarchy, a concept with which I was previously unfamiliar. I doubt that I can do it justice, but the basic idea (apparently proposed by a Belgian named De Puydt in 1860) is to allow all forms of government to exist and allow people to choose which one they want to live under. It is the ultimate in applying the laissez-faire principles of the ideal marketplace to politics.

Pain and Anxiety

2005-12-29T21:45:00.000-05:00

Word on DefenseTech (see also MilitaryDOTcom and Wonkette) is that the Army wants to deploy the “Active Denial System” to Iraq essentially immediately. Pausing for a moment to penetrate the Orwellian name, I remind the reader that the ADS is a microwave system that looks like a prop from a Godzilla movie, and creates pain without (supposedly) actually cooking the target. The system is described at length at GlobalSecurity. The plan (dubbed Project Sheriff) is to send 15 truck-mounted systems to Iraq, while a more deployable airborne version is developed.

The system operates at 95 GHz. (That’s a frequency roughly 1,000 times higher than the FM band.) The beam is absorbed within the upper millimeter or so of skin; a 2 second burst raises the skin temperature to roughly 50°C. The burst is too short to burn, but it stimulates the nociceptors (more specifically, I am told, the C polymodal nociceptors) to produce an intense sensation of pain and a strong reflex to withdraw. The pain of a 5 second exposure is said to be intolerable.

The decision to get Project Sheriff under way was made by Army Col. Robert Lovett, the project manager for the Rapid Equipping Force, which tries to substantially reduce the time that it normally takes to get newly developed technology into the field. In an October 11 memo to the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Advanced Systems and Concepts, Col. Lovett asked to stop the ADS-1 ACTD (advanced concept technology demonstration – basically, a set of experiments to show that the system is not so risky as to threaten the budgets of future users), and redirect it to immediate deployment to Iraq. “System 1 capabilities have, to date, been sufficiently demonstrated in the ACTD to prove its value to the solider,” Lovett says in the memo. “System 1 current operating constraints can be mitigated if used in Iraq during the November through March time frame without modification.”

Operating constraints? Ah, yes. You’ve got a microwave oven, don’t you? When you cook a TV dinner, the instructions tell you to wait a minute after cooking, to allow the temperature to even out. Reflections within the oven produce zones of constructive interference where the microwave intensity is significantly above the average, and so the food gets extra hot. Of course, the bad guys aren’t in an oven, but there are still lots of opportunities for reflections and focusing. The operator has to be able to judge the power level required given the distance of the targets, while avoiding circumstances that could lead to unhealthy reflections (e.g., too many cars, shop awnings, etc.).

The ADS has been tested on human volunteers for several years. Details of tests in 2003 and 2004 were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project. – an organization campaigning against the use of biological and non-lethal weapons. They were set up to prevent as much as possible any reflection or focusing – by excluding contact lenses and eyeglasses, and various types of buttons and zippers. Oh, and they took metallic objects (keys, coins, etc) away from the test subjects, to avoid hot spots – the same reason that you don’t leave a fork in the microwave. Even so, one volunteer was burned when the operator used the wrong power setting.

I have personal interest in this, because of my background in radio astronomy. These frequencies have been of interest to students of interstellar chemistry since the 1970s, because a number of the relatively simple molecules found in star-forming clouds have measurable emission in this range. (For example, the fundamental emission of carbon monoxide is at 115 GHz.) We observe them with telescopes equipped with fancy versions of FM receivers, mixing the celestial radiation with a nearby frequency generated by a local oscillator to produce much lower frequency signals that are easier to handle. Because the frequencies are so high, you can’t use wires, so the sky and local oscillator signals are piped together via hollow waveguides.

In the earliest receivers, the feed pipe carrying the sky signal was open to the outside, which meant that bugs could fly in and create excess noise. As the last step in tuning the receiver, we would often squint down the feed to check that it was clear. That stopped, though, when an engineer pointed out that half the radiation from the local oscillator was coming out the feed – right into the inquiring eye. He noted that prolonged exposure, even at such low power levels, might have long-term impacts, like tendency to cataracts.

Now, I’m not saying that those volunteers at Kirtland AFB are in trouble. I’m just saying that part of the infrastructure development in Iraq ought to involve training optometrists.

A Biology Teacher I Wish I’d Had

2005-12-27T20:14:00.000-05:00

Science News Online is mostly a subscription-access site, but some articles are posted for free access. Fortunately, one of the freebies from the year-end issue is a delightfully snarky take on teaching the controversy, by Bruce Bower. Thus:

Old-school evolution often occurs too slowly for an observer to see. That's inconvenient for those who limit reality to anything that can be captured on their digital video cameras. For those interested in seeing for themselves, ponder artificial evolution. Consider, for example, dog breeding over the past century or Michael Jackson's face over the past 25 years.

And on the subject of missing links:

Although the intelligent-design people put a lot of stock in missing links, those wacky creatures tell you squat about evolution. So what if we never stumble over the remains of, say, the last common ancestor of apes and people? … Since nobody knows what the common ancestor looked like, scientists in their prickly way may never agree that they've found it. Many questions remain about the ways in which fundamental shape changes arise and foster the evolution of new types of animals. These aren't signs that evolution never happened. They're signs that fascinating turns in evolutionary biology lie ahead for the intellectually curious.

I ommend the reader to peruse the full article.

Monday Quote

2005-12-26T23:47:00.000-05:00

Robinson Jeffers was the poetry of non-sunny California, of the foggy, rainy places where people had yet to make inroads on nature. He seemed to have drawn from his observations of science and war the inference that humanity would soon remove itself from the world – to the world’s advantage. In Roan Stallion, he interrupts a story of an unhappy farmwife (sorry, I know that’s a terrific simplification) with a rant that gives some sense of his argument.


                                          Humanity
     is the start of the race; I say
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to 
     break through, the coal to break into fire,
The atom to be split.
                      Tragedy that breaks man’s face
     and a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him
Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits,
     unnatural crime, inhuman science,
Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls
     of nature, the wild fence-vaulter science,
Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the 
     spinning demons that make an atom,
These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God
     shrilly with fierce voices: not in a man’s shape
He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on
     the Pacific, that laces the suns with planets,
The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity
     in this cosmos?  For him, the last
Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for
     itself, the mould to break away from, the coal
To break into fire, the atom to be split.

Yes, I know it's Tuesday. Blogger wasn't working for me yesterday.

Whimsy

2005-12-21T14:44:00.000-05:00

I am not much of a self-Googler, but I cannot resist playing with statistics. Hence, I tested the sluttishness of this blog by means of this calculator. Set among the results that had been tabulated recently, we find From the Rachel at 3.48%, sluttier than CNN (at 1.46%), far more innocent than Pharyngula (25.31%) or Daily Kos (53.41%), and flush up against Wikipedia (3.5%).

Curiously, while the etymology of ‘slut’ is imperfectly established (apparently, it is not significant that it is one of several Swedish words meaning ‘end’), it seems to have been drawn into English in the 15th century from a German word meaning an untidy or slovenly person. Could it be that higher Slut-o-Meter readings reflect sites that are more free-wheeling in their expression?

From the Rachel: as sluttish as Wikipedia. Something to be proud of.

Temper and Mood in Blogging

2005-12-21T12:55:00.000-05:00

I have yet to satisfy myself that I have struck the right tone in my writing. Many of the blogs that I otherwise enjoy often adopt an impatient and confrontational aspect that makes me uncomfortable. Perhaps I am archaic, but I think Kant would say that a world of such voices would be an unhappy place, and devoid of pleasant dinner conversation.

Still, there are times when intemperance is appropriate. I recently read Cotton Mather’s sermon, A Man of Reason, in which he argues that “a World of Evil would be prevented in the World, if Men would once become so Reasonable.” Of course, Reason supports Faith in his view, but the argument is well made. And in addressing what he calls “a very unreasonable Thing to put me upon the Proof of this Assertion; Or, demand of me a Reason, why a Man should hearken to Reason,” Mather includes a defense of the sarcastical and satirical response to foolishness:

The Man who does not Hearken to Reason, does the part of a Brute, yea, he does worse than a Brute, that is destitute of Reason. We read of Bruitish Men; and of those who are, Jude 10. As Brute Beasts: Men, who as far as they can, quit the order of Men, & rank themselves with Brutes. Verily, A Man who does not Hearken to Reason, so far Unmans himself; Transforms himself so far into a Brute. It is a Bruitish Thing, to refuse the direction of Reason. A Man who abandons the Rules of Reason in what he does, – Pardon me, wretch, that I miscall’d thee, A Man; I will Recall it – such a Brute is worthy to be addressed with nothing but Sarcasm, and Satyr; Go, Thou Brute, Get a little more Hair, and crawl upon all Four, and come not among the Children of Reason any more.

I believe that this sermon was preached in 1709. It is in the anthology American Sermons.