Results tagged “history” from Eccentric Eclectica

Back in my youthful glory days I remember watching with interest the adventures of Will Steger and his arctic band of adventurers. In 1986 Steger and seven colleagues traveled to the North Pole by dogsled. I even attended a speech by Ann Bancroft, the only woman in the 1986 expedition, in the late 1980s.

The expedition left March 7 and reached the pole fifty-five days later, which works out to May 1st. This year the Northwest and Northeast passages are open for the fourth consecutive year.

I sometimes like to kid myself that nothing ever changes. The issues we debate are perennial and keep cropping up over and over. But here is another example, of many, that the world does indeed change around us, and too often not for the better. If the current trends in climate change continue no one will be able to make the same trip that Steger completed in 1986. One more possibility will be closed out and the world will be all the poorer for that lost chance at adventure.

I just finished re-reading The Myth of Sisyphus for my philosophy book club. It has been almost twenty years since I last read it. When I read it before I thought it was brilliant, a cri de coeur for everyone to go out and live an authentic life. Today it doesn’t feel nearly so effective. No doubt some of that is due to changes in myself but there are still some exogenous factors that seem worth exploring.

My first theory was that Camus is too tied to a specific time and historical setting. He wrote in the middle of World War Two, a war that almost defines the absurd. As Adorno once said, there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. For an existentialist there can be no life that doesn’t consider suicide and face the absurd universe head on after the searing experiences of World War.

Then I considered that his argument is only effective for those who are ready to accept it. Perhaps there is a certain psychological state that the reader needs to be in to see the full force of Camus’ arguments. Maybe this is why the absurd seems like the perfect adolescent philosophy. See Holden Caulfield and Paul Goodman. Another group that seems particularly receptive to the absurd message are the religious. The form and style of the Myth of Sisyphus reminds me a lot of the mystical writings of various Christians like Meister Eckert or Pseudo-Dionysius.

My next thought, and the one that feels closest to a possible answer, is postmodernism. Perhaps Camus and the absurd are a relic of the modern era when there was a general consensus, a grand narrative, of enlightenment and human melioration to believe in. Although Camus rejected the meaning of human life he was living at the end of a time when a meaning to human life was still a live question. Today, in the postmodern world, there is no consensus that meaning exists.

On the one hand this may be considered to be the triumph of Camus’ existential absurdism, everyone is now in the middle of an absurd world that seemingly can’t be escaped. It is the impossibility of escape that makes reading Camus so difficult. The idea of revolt against the absurd seems woefully underdetermined. I guess this means I need to keep reading The Rebel if I really want to find an answer.

From John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology by Larry A. Hickman

“What, in Dewey’s view, constitutes responsible technology? This book is an attempt to suggest some answers to that question. By way of review and conclusion, it may be said that Dewey rejected what I have called “straight-line instrumentalism,” or the view that neutral tools are brought to bear on ends that are valued for reasons external to the situations within which those tools have been developed. Drawing on the metaphors that accompanied Darwinian evolutionary theory, Dewey argued that human beings are organisms within nature and that their tool use is one of the developmental edges of natural activity. Tools and artifacts are no more neutral that are plants, nonhuman animals, or human beings themselves: they are interactive within situations that teem with values.

Responsible technology involves for Dewey the choice, the implementation, and the testing of goals that arise from those situations. There is no need of divine intervention to point the way, and the quest for absolute truth constitutes an impediment. Values arise out of inquiry, and once they are refined by inquiry they are brought back to the situations from which they originated in order to ascertain whether they are appropriate. Tools that are utilized in choosing, implement, and testing enter into the articulation of ends, or things to be done, modifying those ends as the need arises. Evolving ends demand the modification of existing tools. Responsible technology thus remains flexible because it must accommodate changing situations. In addition to being resilient, responsible technology is redundant: it does not allow undue risk, and it backs itself up, both in terms of parallel development and in terms of the establishment of plateaus as possible fallback positions. Responsible technology is not so much radical as regenerative.” (202)

Last Saturday I met with some friends from the Minnesota Independent Scholar’s Forum to talk about Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan.

The book is a short, well-written introduction to the many ways people use history for purposes other than understanding or getting to the truth. It parallels Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson. Both MacMillan and Anderson discuss the often contentious moments when history becomes part of nation building and community definition. People use history for many purposes and some of those purposes can be dangerous. Nazi Germany, though a bit of a hackneyed example, shows the risks of reading too much into history.

Early in the discussion someone stated that current history scholarship was much worse than the history written in the late 19th century, back then the scholars actually took part in lengthy exchanges in the journals over ideas and questions of real merit. Today we’ve declined into a bunch of postmodern doubters who don’t believe in history or the truth. I bristled silently through the whole diatribe and let it pass. But the conversation continued and I started hearing some generic arguments about how bad current history education was compared to the great teaching of the past. This was too much, so I spoke up and pulled things back from the brink. We agreed that education was just as bad/good in the past as it is now. In the past there was too much memorizing of dull lists of dates, today there is too much feel good political correctness. (I could’ve argued the latter point about modern political correctness but I didn’t pursue it.) And then my adversary said he had been talking about scholarship not education and the conversation shifted away form the topic. Another in my long list of failed attempts to beat back the beast of declension narratives.

I don’t know why I’m so opposed to these just-so-stories about the decline of something, anything, from a golden age in the past. I felt the same way a few weeks ago when I was talking about poetry and technology. It seems like everywhere I go there is another tale of decline to listen to. I’m beginning to degenerate into quotations - “The past is a different country; they do things differently there.” - attributed to Lesley P. Hartley.

I’m beginning to wonder if there is a psychological temperament at work that makes some people see decline, others see progress, and even fewer see nothing but change. I believe that I’m in the latter camp, neither a believer in ridiculous improvement nor a complainer about fabulous loss. But there is a cost to being a moderate; Aristotle may have praised the golden mean but the only thing in the middle of the road are the unwritten books of authors who didn’t have a axe to grind. I sometimes feel as though my failure to choose between decline and progress is the surest route to the rhetorical doldrums.

History is filled with sudden and gradual changes. The problem I have, and I think it may shared by MacMillan, is when the changes of history are used to make an ideological point about the present in order to advance extrahistorical arguments. The complaints about past historical scholarship I mentioned earlier were made in the service of a larger, hidden complaint about postmodernism. I would rather say that the process of writing history has changed and leave it at that.

But the demand for judgment is never ending. Changes can’t just be acknowledged as changes; they must be evaluated. Was postmodernism a beneficial change for historical scholarship? Are we better or worse off today than we were 100 years ago? The answer to that question puts me into a predicament. I can see evidence for both sides. I’d much rather have the medicine of today than the medicine of the nineteenth century. On the other hand I’d much rather have the streetcar and railroad network of 1900 than the highway mess of 2000.

I’m reluctantly willing to abandon my equanimity and read the former as an example of progress, but reading the latter as a decline raises all sorts of doubts. Perhaps it is a purely political choice: liberals see progress, conservatives see decline.

But this conclusion sticks in my craw even more than the problem I began with. Is it really all just a matter of politics? This feels more like a surrender than an explanation.

I wasn’t alive when Apollo 11 reached the moon forty years ago today. I was alive for Apollo 16 and 17 but less than a year old so my memories are dim.

I do remember reading The High Road by Ben Bova from 1981 and dreaming of becoming an astronaut. That dream was never fulfilled and I’ve become less infatuated with space travel as I’ve aged. That seems sad.

I don’t see many signs of optimism for the future of mankind today. We’ve just lived through a decade that went backward instead of forward. And the prospects for improvement seem dim.

Here are some of the Apollo anniversary web tributes that have caught my attention.

1. The NASA 40th anniversary website
2. A 1969 editorial from Matthew Cheney’s grandfather.
3. Charlie Stross on the stunt value of Apollo and the high cost of future missions
4. Key facts about the spacecraft
5. We Choose the Moon, a Flash-based recreation of the mission, with live audio.
6. Kottke.org big moon post
7. Lane Wallace gets some of the mystery back
8. Charlie Stross reminds us what we really did gain from the space program
9. Tom Wolfe says NASA needed better philosophers. Perhaps they should hire me.

I heard a story on All Things Considered this afternoon about a book that was returned to Washington and Lee University in Virginia, 145 years after it was stolen. Let’s see 2009-145 = 1864. That’s nearing the end of the American Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg took place July 1-3 of 1863. The South surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Washington and Lee University is located in Lexington, VA near the western border of Virginia.

What impressed me about the story was that the book had been in the same family for three generations. The grandson of the Union soldier who stole the book in 1864 died recently and gave the book to a friend who returned it to the library. The reporter didn’t mention how recently the grandson had died but it’s still amazes me that the Civil War could be so close in someone’s memory.

Perhaps this is part of the reason why grudges, once they get started, can last so long. Suppose that Union soldier told his grandson to hate or distrust the South. One hundred plus years later and the hatred might still be tended.

It also reminds me of an extended figure used by Alvin Toffler at the start of "Future Shock". I remember him estimating that there were only 800 generations of human civilization between the present and the invention of agriculture. That number isn’t very large but the changes that have occurred are immense.

It’s interesting how shifting the units of measurement changes our perceptions of distance. So 2000 years, 20 centuries, and 2 millenia are all the same length of time but each of them connotes or feels slightly different. If a generation last 30 years then there are 66 generations between now and the beginning of the Christian era.

When you get beyond human scale it is even more difficult to understand units. When reading professional literature in astronomy or geology you often see references to gigayears - a billion years - and myr for millions of years. Wikipedia says the preferred ISO 31-1 usage is Ma for a mega annum.

The more you dig into it the more complicated the business of standards becomes. NIST - the National Institute of Standards - has an entire book on the conventions used in the international system of units.

Here is what it says about the basic unit of time - the second:

The unit of time, the second, was at one time considered to be the fraction 1/86 400 of the mean solar day. The exact definition of “mean solar day” was left to the astronomers. However measurements showed that irregularities in the rotation of the Earth made this an unsatisfactory definition. In order to define the unit of time more precisely, the 11th CGPM (1960, Resolution 9; CR, 86) adopted a definition given by the International Astronomical Union based on the tropical year 1900. Experimental work, however, had already shown that an atomic standard of time, based on a transition between two energy levels of an atom or a molecule, could be realized and reproduced much more accurately. Considering that a very precise definition of the unit of time is indispensable for science and technology, the 13th CGPM (1967/68, Resolution 1; CR, 103 and Metrologia, 1968, 4, 43) replaced the definition of the second by the following:

The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

It follows that the hyperfine splitting in the ground state of the cesium 133 atom is exactly 9 192 631 770 hertz, ν(133Cs)hfs = 9 192 631 770 Hz.

At its 1997 meeting the CIPM affirmed that: This definition refers to a cesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K. This note was intended to make it clear that the definition of the SI second is based on a cesium atom unperturbed by black body radiation, that is, in an environment whose thermodynamic temperature is 0 K. The frequencies of all primary frequency standards should therefore be corrected for the shift due to ambient radiation, as stated at the meeting of the Consultative Committee for Time and Frequency in 1999.

A limited outline of philosophical methods and history. Being a partial summary from Philosophy’s Second Revolution by D.S. Clarke

Clarke divides philosophy into three eras. Classical, Cartesian, and Linguistic.

1. The classical Greek philosophy used rational intuition, “a direct apprehension of the basic structure of things,” to understand the world and do philosophy. Rational thought was a direct source of evidence for physics, metaphysics, ethics, etc. The goal was a rational cosmology that explained the world and everything in it.
2. Introspection. Descartes and his descendants use intuition to understand the world, especially mental concepts. A division between internal and external worlds was reinforced, dualism rises. The natural sciences get the laws of the natural world, philosophy gets the laws of the mind.
3. Linguistic turn. Pierce rejects intuition and focuses on signs - “The only thought, then, which can possibly cognized is thought in signs.” Philosophy becomes the investigation of language. Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and others continue this thread through to today.

This is as far as Clarke takes his historical survey.

I’d add some possible new methods/explanations.

1. Experimental philosophy, building off of the experimental economics tradition.
2. Social construction. For example definitions of art a la Dickie, Danto, and Eaton.
3. Complexity. There are hints of this in Hofstadter and Holland, especially for cognition.
4. Therapeutic — late Wittgenstein.

It’s 2009 and I’m ready to declare the 2000s as a decade that sucked.

It started with the 2000 election fiasco. Then 9-11, the rush to war in Iraq, the Enron scandal, the Dean scream, and now the economic crisis.

The U.S. income distribution grew increasingly unfair throughout the decade. The real estate bubble grew to such extreme levels that it brought down the entire world economy.

What really annoys me is that it all was so obvious. The Economist has been writing story after story about the housing bubble since 2003. Dean Baker wrote reports and seminars in 2005 and 2006. But none of this seemed to sink into the political establishment or the media.

Stirling Newbery has been saying this since 2005 when I first started reading him on The Blogging of the President. See 4 Great Solutions.

And Jim Kunstler has been sounding the horn at Clusterfuck Nation for a number of years. See his book The Long Emergency Dave Pollard has been beating this drum for a long time as well. 2008 Jon Taplin Grand Theory of Our Present Dilemma

Bill Bonner It’s a Depression, Not a Recession

Even Stiglitz got in on this problem back in September.

Yves Smith on an American Banana Republic with supporting evidence from William Buiter

The contagion continues to spread.

Update - I drafted this on February 8, 2009. Today Economist’s View links to Business Week, A Decade as Bad as the Great Depression.

I’m glad to see this realization continue to spread. I just wish we could have acted sooner to stop some of the destruction.

I went to the University of MN today to see Mary Poovey speak in the last lecture of the IMPACTS series. Her book, A History of the Modern Fact, was one of the standout readings in my science, technology, and society class last spring.

Her topic tonight was “Reflections of a Worried Feminist, 30 years on.” She outlined the impact of feminist theory and activism on literary studies since the late 1970s and questioned how much benefit it has really had on the disciplines, especially the humanities.

She started with a personal anecdote about her first job at Yale. Soon after her arrival, a colleague pulled her aside and told her she needed to publish a book quickly if she had any hope of getting tenure. She panicked; she had never thought about publishing while she was a graduate student. Today that attitude would be naive. Graduate study has become very professionalized since the 1970s.

Her first project was a study of Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the late 1970s and 1980s writing about women was a novel approach to scholarship. But throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s the women’s studies movement, feminism, French literary theory, and liberal politics pushed gender into the center of literary studies. And by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s the cultural wars were in full swing.

I saw Donald Kaagn fire one of the major volleys in the PC wars at my freshman convocation in 1990. I remember thinking the speech was a bit of a shock to the system, what did we know about the cultural wars raging in the academy. Some background on the “Great Political Correctness Panic.”

According to Poovey the theory wave of the 1980s had two outlets during the next 15 years. One outlet was a broadening of literary scholarship that began to look critically at institutions. Her book on the modern fact was one of the outcomes of this wave and moved away from direct literary sources to examine broader cultural trends. The other outlet was an elaboration of the leftist critique of gender. Gender became the central ideological issue for some literary scholars. She cited Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Sedgwick and Colonial Desire by Robert Young as two examples of this second outlet.

The two groups had different scholarly approaches and outlooks. The first group - the culturalists - tended to work on 18th and early 19th century topics and focus their literary arguments on broad changes to large categories, such as genre. The second group - the politicists (my terminology for both camps) - tended to focus on the later 19th century and the early 20th century when the problems of colonialism began to come to the fore and would often use literary scholarship to discover the telling allegory that confirmed their existing theoretic positions on the importance of gender.

During the same time period there has been a continual decline in the institutional power of the humanities within the university. The humanities don’t make money or bring in grants like the sciences and so they are marginalized by administrators.

Recently, Poovey has begun to question her belief in the transformative politics of the classroom. She and many others believed that the wave of ethnic and women’s studies departments started during the 1970s would have a liberalizing effect on student politics. If only we taught students how to think like the liberal professorate then the world would become a better place. But this didn’t happen. During the Q&A this was described by an audience member as the “narcissism of the classroom.” Today she has turned her teaching away from political topics to studies about the development of genre and the history of the discipline.

She concluded that we are faced with a choice between teaching as a political activity, which doesn’t seem effective and contributes to the marginalization of imaginative studies, or teaching as a disciplinary act.

In another anecdote she described a recent forum at NYU on the close reading requirement for undergraduate courses. Almost everyone agreed that close reading was useful. But near the end of the discussion one of the graduate students spoke up and said that everything that was said up to that point was useless to her as a radical lesbian teacher. The spirit of the discussion quickly chilled. Many of those who supported the political form of teaching were 20th century Americanists. During the Q&A this bias toward recent American studies seemed to be indicative of a general arrogance on the part of Americans seeing the world and literary studies through their own ideological blinders.

She said that the humanities are being squeezed between an antithetical administration that sees no value in them and a diffuse politics of identity that has no lasting effects. Politics in the classroom, a place that is already highly privileged, does not equal politics in Chinatown or Bed-Stuy. If we continue to politicize the classroom then the discipline of literary studies will lose its value.

For further reading and evidence I offer this commentary at Evolving Thoughts and two recent columns by Stanley Fish on French Theory in America.

Derrick de Kerckhove is the director of the McLuhan program at the University of Toronto and has the following things to say in a recent interview.

TF: What will be the key societal impact of mobile telephony/Internet?

De Kerckhove: Acceleration. Mobile telephony and Internet is accelerating society in at least two ways: Vastly increasing the volume of human transactions, and reducing the time delay between transactions.
...
The difference between today's accumulation of knowledge and connectivity and that of the Renaissance is qualitative as well as quantitative. While the printing press distributed knowledge in different places and different formats with comparatively slow access routes, the mobile Internet gives access to all of that information and infinitely more of it anywhere, anytime. Ever more efficient search engines are making that access not just merely pertinent but "hypertinent" which is the logic of the memory in our brains. Every time we think, we summon the most pertinent information available in our mind. Imagine having the same kind of access to the contents of everybody else's mind at once. It's quite literally mind-boggling.

The first paragraph states the obvious point that society is accelerating, although it dose enumerate two important dimensions to the acceleration: volume and delay.

The second paragraph is more interesting. I especially like the 'hypertinent' coining. This extension of our own memory to the global memory represented in search engines is the beginning of the creative extension that I predict will happen over the next several decades as our minds become intertwined with subagents (computer progams and interpersonal data connections). That term needs a better name but I haven't found it yet.