Intellectuals

Intellectuals:

In The New Republic:

Although it’s deeply politically incorrect to say so, intellectually, things were better under the Bush administration.

I could think of lots of worse things to be doing than to be making armor in Poland.

LUBLIN, Poland (Reuters) – Just like his Medieval counterparts 600 years ago armourer Tomasz Samula has hardly any time to outfit his knights before battle commences.

Samula is racing to add the final touches to the metal breastplates, helmets, gloves and other accoutrements needed by the Lublin knights before they take part in re-enacting Grunwald, one of the largest battles of the Medieval age.

I imagine Lars and Grim will appreciate this item.

Respect and Women

Respect and Women:

I've been following Cassandra's despair over this nonsense, and it occurs to me that someone should point out a couple of things to any vulnerable young men in danger of believing in Roissy. The first is that Roissy may be dumb enough to believe what he's writing, but his picture of human psychology isn't even accurate when he's describing himself. He says, that is, that all male 'attention seeking' is really about trying to obtain sex.

In fact, however, all his writing about sex is really to obtain attention. His attempt to reduce all human activity to sexual longing is false on its face.

The second thing that ought to be pointed out, to a young man despairing of finding love, is that the model is entirely wrong about what women want. What women look for in a man is respect.

I do not mean merely the obvious: that women want a man who respects them, or that they want a man who respects women. What is at least important is that they want a man who respects himself. They want a man who aspires to things, because he wouldn't respect himself if he didn't. They want a man who treats himself like a man of honor, which means that he behaves like a man of honor. That means he takes his word seriously, and does his duty. If he also treats women with honor and respect, he will not lack for love from women of worth.

That is simply said, but done with much labor. It is far harder than trying to fool them into thinking you might be worthwhile. Yet you can fool even a foolish person only for so long; the price of relying on that tactic is that you cast away the thing that really mattered, which was love. Oh, I know you're supposed to believe that love isn't what you "really" want; but deep down, you know the truth.

Courtship Rite

Threats or Promises?

As the November elections approach, we hear a good deal of doubt about whether they can be expected to make a difference, or whether the new pols will fall prey to the same temptations as the old once in office. I worry a lot, as do many, about whether you can make a democracy work when a slim majority can vote to require the slim minority supply their material needs, or when a politician's best chance of being elected is to promise short-term perks no matter the long-term consequences. Then this week's controversy erupted over whether the President did or did not personally guarantee that passing the Stimulus Bill in 2009 would prevent unemployment rates from hitting 9%, and whether that should be construed as a promise or merely an "unenforceable" prediction.

It reminded me of one of my favorite science fiction novels, "Courtship Rite." Part of the setup in this imagined world is that the leader is called the "Prime Predictor," and earns his post not by favoritism or descent but because the predictions he has deposited in the official archives have proved more accurate than those of any of his countrymen. The Prime Predictor presides over a council. Each citizen is given a vote in council proportionate to his personal constituency, defined as those loyal friends whom, on being challenged, he can list by name and detailed concerns. A citizen who can identify no constituency must remain childless or leave the clan.

In this hypothetical society, promising goodies that you can't deliver is instant disaster, as is winning support for a policy by predicting a successful result that does not materialize. It doesn't help to have good explanations for why the predicted result doesn't materialize, unless you accurately predicted the obstacles, too. A side benefit is the imagined society's extreme care taken in the negotiation of contracts, where the emphasis is on finding an agreement that most accurately embodies the expectations of both parties and is highly unlikely to disappoint either. Tricking someone into a bad deal is self-defeating when your political power depends on your public predictions having come true.

Folías de España

Folías de España:

I'll join Eric in giving honor to the Spanish for their victory in soccer, though to my mind the far greater honor is in having inspired this tune.

La Belle Homicide:

There is a particularly awesome version of this on this record, but I see no version online. It is amazing; this video is a small hint of what it manages.

A Lost Bird

From the writings of the Venerable Bede, an analogy from an ancient British pagan. It comes from the period of the conversion of Northumbria, under St. Edwin, king of that land in part of the seventh century. (It happens that I was born on his feast day.) The conversion was by conquest, but the story is a fairly insightful image for thinking about the human condition:

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before of what is to follow we are utterly ignorant.

So the bird flies into our hall, and we see it come; and we see it pass through our hall, lit by our fire; and then it flies out the other end, and we know no more of it. This is like the soul, which comes from who knows where? And where does it go?

G. K. Chesterton had one of his Danes re-tell the story in The Ballad of the White Horse:

‘For this is a heavy matter,
And the truth is cold to tell;
Do we not know, have we not heard,
The soul is like a lost bird,
The body a broken shell.

‘And a man hopes, being ignorant,
Till in white woods apart
He finds at last the lost bird dead;
And a man may still lift up his head
But never more his heart.

Chesterton's version goes beyond the pagan story, which begins and ends in honest mystery: it allows the soul extinguished, even as a concept, by 'cold truth' that comes at the end of 'being ignorant.' Guthram, the great king, has come to believe this. He sings that his wars are waged for no other reason than to try to drive the memory of this thought from his mind.

After his poem, Alfred takes the harp. He sings boldly, but:

And the King, with harp on shoulder,
Stood up and ceased his song;
And the owls moaned from the mighty trees,
And the Danes laughed loud and long.

The first time I read the Ballad of the White Horse, I found this entire book an annoying bit of sermonizing in an otherwise rousing tale of war and adventure. I've come to realize that, instead, this book is the heart of the work.

The Twelfth of July

On the Twelfth of July:

I nearly forgot.



"King Billy" would be William of Orange, who came to fight the Jacobites of the Scottish, Stewart line in their last great stronghold in the year 1689. Later the Scots thought better of it, and gave the Stewarts two more good tries, in 1715 and again, for the famous "Bonny Prince Charlie," in 1745.

Didn't work out. But as the man said: "May have been the losing side; still not convinced it was the wrong side."

World Cup Result.

The round table. Or hall. Or something like that.

Researchers exploring the legend of Britain’s most famous Knight believe his stronghold of Camelot was built on the site of a recently discovered Roman amphitheatre in Chester.

Wisdom and Education

Wisdom and Education:

Here's an article that jumps right into Neo-Platonism as it affects a current debate among scientists.

Is there such a thing as wisdom -- a thing, stuff, an abstract entity -- or are there only wise individuals and wise actions and attitudes, these latter not exclusively the possession of the individuals in question given that even fools can sometimes be wise?

This question is a significant one, because it bears on the enterprise of "wisdom studies," a parallel endeavour to the "happiness studies" now big in the neuropsychologically-informed social sciences. (And there too the question has to be: is there such a thing as happiness, or only happy individuals and happy times and experiences, the latter not the exclusive property of the individuals in question, given that even the gloomiest of us can occasionally be happy?) If you aim to study wisdom, or happiness, presumably in the hope of finding out how we can all be wiser and happier, you had better be clear about the object of study; and, as Stephen S. Hall's Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience shows, that is hard to do.

I am somewhat amused by the persistence of this stumbling block, which was a major issue at the fall of Rome; again, during the return of Aristotle's writings following an early Medieval period dominated by neo-Platonists; again, as we were just discussing the other day, at the beginning of the Renaissance; again, in the nineteenth century when many of our ideas about language were being re-examined, and some of the old ideas of Peter Abelard were being independently rediscovered by men like Gottlob Frege; at several points in the 20th Century; and again, now.

In other words, it's one of the eternal stumbling blocks of philosophy: a basic metaphysical claim that both scientists and philosophers continue to dispute. Nor is this a "science v. philosophy" issue: there are scientists on both sides, and philosophers on both sides.

Science might be expected to shed some light on this question, and sometimes it seems like it is going to do so in a very helpful way. It may yet! Consider anger:

Lixing Sun, a professor of biology at Central Washington University, thinks we have a "fairness instinct." And he may be right. He maintains that high on the roster of human propensities is a "Robin Hood mentality" that characterizes our species and qualifies as one of those "mental modules" that evolutionary psychologists consider part of our likely biological inheritance. If so, our fairness instinct goes far beyond the pleasure we take in romantic tales of medieval Merry Men adventuring in Sherwood Forest. Sun believes that despite the fact of our specieswide social and economic disparities—perhaps in part because of them—human beings are endowed (or burdened) with an acute sensitivity to "who is getting how much," in particular a deft attunement to whether anyone else is getting more or less than one's self.

In a much-noted laboratory experiment several years ago, described in the report "Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay," the primatologists Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B.M. de Waal trained capuchin monkeys to perform a certain task for which they received cucumber slices. The monkeys performed just fine, until they were permitted to see others being rewarded with grapes, a higher-value payment. Previously acquiescent, many of the cucumber-receivers promptly stopped participating, sometimes even throwing those measly, unfair cucumber payments out of their cage.

So: that suggests a neo-Platonist position, does it not? After all, monkeys are expressing "anger" over "unfairness" in just the same way as their not-very-close relatives, humanity. This suggests there might be some real set of qualities that capture "fairness," and that perhaps we can build systems to ensure these outcomes.

The problem is that the split isn't over data, but over how we interpret data. So, if I am instead a Nominalist -- that is, I don't think that "wisdom" or "fairness" are real, but just names -- I can point out that we humans are doing the observation and naming in both cases. Thus, you're just as free to be a Nominalist about this data. There's only one category, after all; and humans are making the rules about what data to include in that category.

If that's the case, then it's not clear that we could capture what "fairness" really is; indeed, by including the different case of monkeys in the category, we may be making it impossible to get at a system that approaches human ideals. (A system that ensured all people got equal numbers of grapes and cucumbers would not be very satisfying to humanity! We would prefer a choice.)

Here is one of the basic splits in our understanding of reality, then. Which of you are Realists, and which Nominalists? Don't be surprised if one position seems entirely and obviously correct to you, and the other preposterous on its face: that has very often been the case, for adherents on both sides, across the centuries.

Another good question, then: Why have so many smart people been so unable to see the reasons that so many other smart people have favored the other position?

Europe and Women

Europe and Women: A Day in the Life

Cassandra notes a story wherein France stands up for its vision of what a woman's rights are, and should be. As comments note, that right does not include the religious freedom to choose to veil in public; but it does include a freedom from being forced to do so. While not "optimal," as Mr. Axlerod might say, it's better than nothing.

Switzerland, however, has freed Roman Polanski. Their reasons for doing so appear to be that the US Justice Department did not correctly handle the Swiss legal procedure, by failing to properly answer Polanski's claim that he had already served his agreed upon sentence of 42 days of "observation." I'm sure that he did not enjoy his month and a half in jail. The fact is, however, that his offense included raping and forcibly sodomizing a girl who was not only smaller and weaker than him, and not merely a minor while he was an adult, but whom he also had weakened by giving her drugs and alcohol.

The law is rarely just, however, and this case may well have been decided upon the law. I suppose we're meant to feel good about that.

Spatial Thinking

Android Dreams

From Vanderleun, this Smithsonian article about imposing virtual maps on sensory input:

Hold an electronic tablet up as you walk along a street, and it will show an annotated overlay of the real street ahead—where the clean restrooms are, which stores sell your favorite items, where your friends are hanging out. Computer chips are becoming so small, and screens so thin and cheap, that in the next 40 years semi­transparent eyeglasses will apply an informational layer to reality. If you pick up an object while peering through these spectacles, the object’s (or place’s) essential information will appear in overlay text. In this way screens will enable us to “read” everything, not just text. Last year alone, five quintillion (10 to the power of 18) transistors were embedded into objects other than computers. Very soon most manufactured items, from shoes to cans of soup, will contain a small sliver of dim intelligence, and screens will be the tool we use to interact with this transistorized information.

iPhone already has apps that create overlays on reality in very handy ways. One is an app that listens to a song on the radio and tells you what it is, which I consider pure magic I've been waiting for all my life. Even better, there is an app that can identify a tune that's being hummed in the roughest and most incompetent way.

I thought there was another app that lets you point the screen at the night sky and see a superimposed constellation map, but it turns out it really uses your GPS-determined location to load a map of the sky you ought to be looking at, rather operating directly off of the visual input. Pretty nifty anyway.

The Smithsonian article also offers this view of the increased powers of intellectual synthesis that may result from web-surfing:

Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day.

My own experience is that following links sometimes fragments my attention and leads me down rabbit holes, but it also encourages me to connect many ideas I might not otherwise have done. I suppose there's the danger of turning into one of those guys who's always muttering about how "it's all part of the pattern: the Freemasons, Obama's birth certificate, fluoridation."

Hooray!

Good news.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7883874/Historians-locate-King-Arthurs-Round-Table.html

Church Music

The Wedding Feast

Here's something from Assistant Village Idiot that reminded me of what we were talking about the other day, the metaphor of music or dance as Heaven:

One of my repeated themes of the last year is that worship is not something we create on Sunday mornings. Worship is going on all the time in heaven, and our worship is an attempt to connect with that - to become part of it, learn the steps and the songs. If you remember the descriptions of heaven as a wedding feast, then the idea of learning all those line dances, preparing for the songs that have special meanings at various parts of the ceremony, and looking forward to drinking almost too much except now you actually have good judgment, can begin to see how the combination of pentecostal enthusiasm and liturgical familiarity might work.

The Anchoress (h/t Little Miss Atilla) hosted a long discussion the other day about the role of music in church services, during which lots of people got to air their frustrations with the trend in hymns in the last forty years or so. The point of the article was to ask readers to identify their ten most-hated hymns, but a lot of the discussion was equally about why some music works better than others. (I was surprised to hear that even what I think of as traditional old Episcopal hymns were a hotbed of heresy from the point of view of Catholics, but there you are! My education in most of what separates Catholics from Episcopalians is spotty, aside from obvious things like the authority of the Pope.)

Salute!

Let us Render a Proper Salute!

I saw this photo over at the Cold Steel Blog.



Like you, I assumed he was planning on cleaning that boar with that knife.

Nope. That's what he killed it with.

One of these:



Now that's a man.

Adjuncts

The Adjunct Professor:

Grade inflation continues apace, but the amount of time students spend studying continues to fall across the board. Some theories as to why this may be the case include this:

Mother Jones commenter Lisa argues, "Rise in numbers of temporary, adjunct faculty, who teach many, many courses, and are terribly vulnerable to course evaluations (that's me, by the way). One can only assign so much work and expect to be invited back to teach -- plus, if you assign it, you have to read it and/or grade it yourself, which, when you're teaching four or five classes on multiple campuses, becomes impossible. This has become the bulk of university teaching[.]"

How vulnerable are adjunct professors to student comments? So vulnerable that a professor of Catholic studies can be fired for teaching Catholic doctrine:

The University of Illinois has fired an adjunct professor who taught courses on Catholicism after a student accused the instructor of engaging in hate speech by saying he agrees with the church’s teaching that homosexual sex is immoral.

The professor, Ken Howell of Champaign, said his firing violates his academic freedom. He also lost his job at an on-campus Catholic center.

Howell, who taught Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought, says he was fired at the end of the spring semester after sending an e-mail explaining some Catholic beliefs to his students preparing for an exam.

His email has been published for consideration. It's not great as a teaching tool -- it's generally not good academic practice to say things like, "I won't go into details here but a survey of the last few centuries reveals..." in academic discourse. Cite your sources!

On the other hand, (a) he is teaching a Catholic doctrine, as a professor of Catholic studies, and he's broadly correct about the doctrine; and (b) he raises some good points about some bad thinking prominent in current American thought. It really is the case that we, as a culture, have trouble separating people and actions. We see this all the time; if a Bill Clinton does something wrong, rather than saying that we approve of him in spite of his misdeed (which we condemn), we say either that the misdeed proves he is a wicked man outright; or we rush to find a way to explain his misdeed so that it isn't wrong at all. Just a few examples I remember hearing at the time: 'He was just being a gentleman in committing perjury to protect a young woman's reputation'; 'He was under a lot of stress from all the good he was doing'; 'She was a stalker, so it was really the fault of the person I don't approve of instead of the one I do'; 'It was a private matter that should not be subject to public moral evaluation.'

That approach to moral thought impoverishes us, as we lose the ability to condemn even clear wrongs like perjury and adultery. We all remember the rush of the feminist leadership to stand with Bill Clinton, and smooth away the faults of his betrayal of his wife and abusive advantage-taking of a young woman awed by his power and position. It is just as harmful from the other side, however: those who use the misdeed to condemn the whole man end up missing his good qualities. I was guilty of this myself; with time to reflect, his positive qualities have become more apparent.

Honest attempts at teaching that kind of lesson to college students, who are still young enough to be full of fire -- likely to rage, at times, against things they don't like to hear -- means you will occasionally draw some negative comments. These may be quite fiery. Yet this is what tenure was for: to ensure that one could honestly teach even controversial positions without fear for losing one's job.

Tenure led to some 'untenable' consequences, especially in terms of finances, but it needs to be replaced with something that protects this basic idea. If we've come to the place that a Catholic professor of Catholic studies teaching an introduction to Catholic thinking can be fired for expressing Catholic doctrine, we've gone too far. Students were supposed to be challenged to think about these principles, not have their own prejudices catered to by the professor. If it were a Muslim professor of Islamic studies teaching an introduction to Islam, we wouldn't think of firing him for expressing agreement with some point of shariah, and nor should we. If we want to learn about why people believe in shariah and are willing to structure their lives around it, we need honest teachers.

It would also help if students weren't so convinced that the professor's job is to give them A's while making them comfortable. Since it's unlikely we will persuade the students to feel that way, however, the next best thing is to ensure that professors who hold them to high standards -- and who make real attempts to teach controversial or difficult subjects -- will not be fired for doing what is, in fact, their job.

A Revolutionary Battle

A Revolutionary Battle:

Via Red State.

A Kindred Spirit?

A Kindred Spirit?

My Chinese is still good enough to recognize that the first two characters read "Middle Ages." It's a collection of medieval music, apparently from a Chinese speaker with most excellent taste.

I have a Chinese-language book on the Vikings, to tie this in with the post below; as well as a French-language edition of the same book, which I bought because I could read only small amounts of Mandarin even when I was there encountering the language daily. (The book is available in English as well; but the French appears to be the original. Amazon does not appear to sell the Chinese edition, if it is still in print, but I still have mine.) I bought the Chinese version to loan to my students who were interested in Western culture and history; it was one of a very few books I ever found on the subject available in Mandarin.

It's good to see interest in these topics across the sea. Japanese and Western cultures harmonize on a number of points, but China had a very different cultural opinion on warriors. Witness the old Chinese saying, "You don't use a good man to make a soldier, just as you don't use good iron to make nails"! Yet the Beijing opera tradition, which has infected Hong Kong cinema (and, these days, everything everywhere) has invigorated Chinese interest in their traditional martial arts probably far beyond what it was during the Middle Kingdom's own Middle Ages.

UPDATE: If my Chinese friend should backtrack the link to his site, here is a video he might like that I don't think he has:

J.A. Dalza - Calata ala Spagnola from Valéry Sauvage on Vimeo.

Njal's Saga, First Week Discussion:

Image from here.

We are reading The Saga of Burnt Njal. This week we are to discuss sections 1-20. By the end of these sections, the two main characters of the saga are introduced: Gunnar and Njal himself. Let's look at their base descriptions, along with the notes provided.

Gunnar:

There was a man whose name was Gunnar. He was one of Unna's
kinsmen, and his mother's name was Rannveig (1). Gunnar's father
was named Hamond (2). Gunnar Hamond's son dwelt at Lithend, in
the Fleetlithe. He was a tall man in growth, and a strong man --
best skilled in arms of all men. He could cut or thrust or shoot
if he chose as well with his left as with his right hand, and he
smote so swiftly with his sword, that three seemed to flash
through the air at once. He was the best shot with the bow of
all men, and never missed his mark. He could leap more than his
own height, with all his war-gear, and as far backwards as
forwards. He could swim like a seal, and there was no game in
which it was any good for any one to strive with him; and so it
has been said that no man was his match. He was handsome of
feature, and fair skinned. His nose was straight, and a little
turned up at the end. He was blue-eyed and bright-eyed, and
ruddy-cheeked. His hair thick, and of good hue, and hanging down
in comely curls. The most courteous of men was he, of sturdy
frame and strong will, bountiful and gentle, a fast friend, but
hard to please when making them. He was wealthy in goods.


ENDNOTES:

(1) She was the daughter of Sigfuss, the son of Sighvat the Red;
he was slain at Sandhol Ferry.
(2) He was the son of Gunnar Baugsson, after whom Gunnar's holt
is called. Hamond's mother's name was Hrafnhilda. She was
the daughter of Storolf Heing's son. Storolf was brother to
Hrafn the Speaker of the Law, the son of Storolf was Orin
the Strong.

Njal:

There was a man whose name was Njal. He was the son of Thorgeir
Gelling, the son of Thorolf. Njal's mother's name was Asgerda
(1). Njal dwelt at Bergthorsknoll in the land-isles; he had
another homestead on Thorolfsfell. Njal was wealthy in goods,
and handsome of face; no beard grew on his chin. He was so great
a lawyer, that his match was not to be found. Wise too he was,
and foreknowing and foresighted (2). Of good counsel, and ready
to give it, and all that he advised men was sure to be the best
for them to do. Gentle and generous, he unravelled every man's
knotty points who came to see him about them. Bergthora was his
wife's name; she was Skarphedinn's daughter, a very high-
spirited, brave-hearted woman, but somewhat hard-tempered. They
had six children, three daughters and three sons, and they all
come afterwards into this story.


ENDNOTES:

(1) She was the daughter of Lord Ar the Silent. She had come
out hither to Iceland from Norway, and taken land to the
west of Markfleet, between Auldastone and Selialandsmull.
Her son was Holt-Thorir, the father of Thorleif Crow, from
whom the Wood-dwellers are sprung, and of Thorgrim the Tall,
and Skorargeir.
(2) This means that Njal was one of those gifted beings who,
according to the firm belief of that age, had a more than
human insight into things about to happen. It answers very
nearly to the Scottish "second sight."

We can see, as Mike noted, that parentage and families are very important: we don't just learn about the personal qualities of our heroes, but about their parentage on both sides of the family. The notes say what the original listeners would have known, about which families and to what great historic heroes their parentage may tie them.

What did you think of the first week's readings? Next week, we'll do the next section, 21-37.