Sorry, you must be a member of the group to do that. Join this group.
Oxford University Press's Blog, page 1042
July 12, 2012
The role of ignorance in science
Most of us have a false impression of science as a surefire, deliberate, step-by-step method for finding things out and getting things done. In fact, more often than not, science is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, and there may not be a cat in the room.
We sat down with author Stuart Firestein to discuss the relationship between science and ignorance, the importance of asking the right questions, and which scientists are to be admired for throwing everything that was known out the window to come up with some of the unifying theories of life itself.
Stuart Firestein on the reliability of facts
Click here to view the embedded video.
Stuart Firestein on predicting the future of science
Click here to view the embedded video.
Stuart Firestein’s Favorite Scientists
Click here to view the embedded video.
Stuart Firestein is the author of Ignorance: How It Drives Science. A Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, his highly popular course on ignorance invites working scientists to come talk to students each week about what they don’t know. Dedicated to promoting science to a public audience, he serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program for the Public Understanding of Science and was awarded the 2011 Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for excellence in scholarship and teaching. Also, he was recently named an AAAS Fellow.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only science and medicine articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the 
“I Hope They Don’t Think We’re a Rock ‘n’ Roll Outfit”: The Rolling Stones Debut, 12 July 1962
Fifty years ago, in one of London’s busiest shopping districts, the Rolling Stones stepped onto a stage for the first time, full of adolescent confidence and probably not a little performance anxiety. On this Thursday night, a crowd of friends and the curious came to support this muddle of middle-class English adolescents ambitiously exploring a relatively esoteric niche of American music. But everything about this first gig would portend a band that would be, a band that parents would hate and teens love, a band that would be ruthless in its pursuit of success.
In July 1962, London’s Marquee Club occupied an address in Oxford Street (near Marks and Spencer’s flagship department store) to compete with other London venues catering to jazz aficionados. Fans tended to divide along the lines of the modern and “trad” jazz, but both held a reverence for jazz’s urtext: the blues. Like possessed antiquarians, British collectors sought out the rarest American recordings, actively consumed myths about its practitioners, and emotionally argued the details and the aesthetics of the exotic music emanating from their turntables. Musical conservatives demanded to hear recreations of those recordings, such that when Muddy Waters (with pianist Otis Spann) arrived in Britain in 1958, his electric guitar often remained silent. However, locals Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner liked the “new” electric blues, and initiated special evenings that sometimes featured American artists and sometimes, British enthusiasts.
The Marquee Club in 2007. Photo by Kiwi. Creative Commons License.
In March 1962, Davies and Korner began booking nights for a floating collective of like-minded musicians they would call “Blues Incorporated.” Over the following months and years, this scene would also attract a number of prominent musicians in the making, including Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, John Baldry, Graham Bond, Paul Pond (Jones), Charlie Watts, and others, and would prove a prep school for British blues. Buoyed by the growing interest in the music, Davies and Korner arranged a night of blues in suburban Ealing during which the slide-guitar playing of Brian Jones (19 and performing under the alias of Elmo Lewis) duly impressed both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (both 18).
The extended jam sessions in Ealing and London encouraged Jagger, Richards, and Jones to form their own “rhythm and blues group,” which would also include Dick Taylor (who would later go on to join the Pretty Things) on bass, Ian Stewart (who would remain hidden on the Stones’ team for years) on piano, and Mick Avery (who would become a member of the Kinks) on drums. Their opportunity to perform independently of Blues Incorporated arose when an evening opened at the Marquee and Jones lobbied for this band to perform. When asked for the name of the group, Jones characteristically improvised, blurting out the name of Muddy Waters’ signature record, “Rollin’ Stone.”
In anticipation of the Rolling Stones’ first engagement, Jagger tried his hand at media relations. Aware of how Cyril Davies disdained the near sibling of R&B, Jagger told the local Jazz News, “I hope they don’t think we’re a rock ‘n’ roll outfit.” To that end, their set list that night featured covers of standards by Robert Johnson (“I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom”), Muddy Waters (“I Want You to Love Me”), and Jay McShann (“Confessin’ the Blues”). But in the middle of their performance, Keith Richards insisted on inserting Chuck Berry’s “Back in the USA” to build some up-tempo excitement. The adults in the room knew rock ‘n’ roll when they heard it and the group would not return until September.
At the core of the band, Jagger’s vocals and Keith Richards’ rhythmic guitar generated the sparks, while Brian Jones added an edge of sophisticated unpredictability on guitar and harmonica. Jagger’s ability and interest in using publicity to shape public perceptions of the band would eventually find an ally in Andrew Oldham who would become the band’s manager (and producer) a year later. Together, they would become masters at managing the press, hitting on the idea of portraying themselves as the anti-Beatles, the bad boys of pop music. The blues and rhythm-and-blues repertoire with its celebration of sex, machismo, and intoxication would play neatly into this image and Richards’ interest in a fusion of blues, rhythm-and-blues, and rock ‘n’ roll would prove to be a defining feature of the band’s sound. Three years later, his “Satisfaction” would top the charts. The Jazz News article listed Ian Stewart only as “Stu,” marking him as a demi member of the band who would eventually become their road manager and sometime accompanist, but never a real Stone. Taylor, Avory, Chapman, and others would prove transient solutions while Jagger, Richards, and Jones searched for a suitable drum-and-bass foundation on which to stage their adult-taunting paeans.
Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the
What effect does immigration have on wages?
Concern about the economic impact on UK-born workers motivates much opposition to high levels of immigration. Immigration over the past decade and a half has brought new workers into the country who are younger and better educated both than British born workers and earlier immigrants. For these newly arrived workers to be employed requires either that they displace employed workers already resident or that the labour market adjusts somehow so as to absorb them. Fears that such adjustment may harm the interests of the existing UK labour force reappear frequently in political argument.
The evidence that immigration adds to UK unemployment is thin so how does the labour market adjust to incorporate them? There are many ways in which the labour market can adjust so as to accommodate the higher number of new workers. It can change the types of goods produced, expanding production of goods which use newly abundant skill types. It can adopt different technologies which are more appropriate to the new mix of skills. It can import more of other inputs, particularly internationally mobile sorts of capital, raising demand for workers by raising their productivity. Any or all of these may happen and it is not implausible that in the long run they may be all that is needed to absorb the immigrant inflow into the labour market. However adjustment can also come through wages. Rates of remuneration of different inputs to production can change so as to make employment of the newly arrived labour more attractive. To the extent that such changes can happen quickly and to the extent that such changes may be a necessary intermediate step that provides signals which prompt other adjustments to occur, these effects may be the main ones to occur in the short run.
If changes in wages are to occur then they may not be simple. Immigrants may compete strongly with workers performing certain tasks, while complementing the labour of those doing others. Evidence published in the latest Review of Economic Studies and drawing on evidence for the period 1997-2005 looks to see at what points in the wage distribution of UK-born workers changes are most strongly correlated with immigrant inflows. Estimates of the wage effects of immigration at points across the whole distribution present a clear picture suggestive of strongest negative effects at the bottom end of the distribution of wages and wage rises higher up. These effects are modest; for each 1% increase in the ratio of immigrants to the UK born working-age population the fall in wages is about 0.5% at the lowest decile and the gain about 0.6% at the median.
Given the observation that immigrants are typically better educated than those already working in the UK labour market the location of these effects is perhaps surprising. Assuming that immigrants compete most strongly with those similarly qualified would lead one to expect depressing effects on wages higher up the distribution. However if you look at the wages earned by recent immigrants a different picture emerges. Immigrants, especially the most recently arrived, work for wages much lower than you would expect for a UK born worker with similar qualifications. There is indeed a striking inverted similarity in shape between pictures showing where in the wage distribution immigrants are found within 2 years of arrival and where wage effects are strongest.
Looking at the wages of more and less recent immigrants shows that over time immigrants move up the distribution towards jobs providing wages more suited to their qualifications as they integrate into job-finding networks and acquire host-country-specific skills, especially language ability, which enhance productivity in the British labour market. As that happens the downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the labour market should alleviate.
Are these effects on wages pure redistribution or is there also an imbalance between losses and gains at different points in the distribution? Taking the effects at all points in the distribution together, the evidence seems to point to a slight average gain. Maybe immigration “greases the wheels” of the labour market, overcoming problems caused by immobility of local labour and addressing specific labour shortages; perhaps immigrants are paid less than the value of what they add to production because of downgrading generating a surplus that benefits other workers.
Whatever the reason, the gains in wages of those higher up appear to be at least enough to compensate the losers at the bottom. There is little reason to see immigration as harming the returns to labour overall. What it may do is aggravate wage inequality in the short term as newly arrived immigrants enter the labour market at the lower end, holding back wages of the lowest paid, even if only modestly so, while benefiting those higher up. If a liberal immigration policy could be combined with progressive policies to effectively redistribute the gains then the benefits could be enjoyed generally. Meanwhile, labour market institutions, such as the national minimum wage, which protect wages at the bottom remain important safeguards for the lowest paid.
Ian Preston is Professor of Economics at University College London, Deputy Research Director of the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration and a Research Fellow of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He is on Twitter at @ianppreston. For more information on this topic, the Review of Economic Studies has made the paper The Effect of Immigration on the Distribution of Wages, by Christian Dustmann, free for a limited time.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to business and economics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
July 11, 2012
Back to the fishbowl (1): ‘Herring’
The fish known as Clupea harengas has two main names. In the Scandinavian countries, it is called sild or something similar (this name made its way to Finland and Russia). In the lands where the West Germanic languages are spoken (English belongs to this group) the word is herring, also with several variants, for example, German Hering (the spelling Häring is quite obsolete), Dutch haring, and so forth. The rarely used English word sile “young herring” is a late adaptation of sild. The origin of both sild and herring is doubtful.
_-_Amsterdam.PNG)
The salting of herring catch in Haringpakkerij, Amsterdam. Engraving. Early 17th century. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
As far as we can judge, people around the Baltic Sea consumed, cured, and traded in salted herring for millennia. In Old English, the word heringas (plural) appeared in the earliest glosses and rendered Latin sardinas. Another gloss gives hæringcas (æ has the value of Modern Engl. a in hat). The options facing an etymologist are familiar. Perhaps the word is Germanic and the fish was named for its appearance, habits, or habitat. Perhaps the people who settled on the shores of the Baltic Sea learned everything about this fish, including its name, from the extinct or assimilated natives. If such is the case, the sought-for etymology will never be discovered. But perhaps the word is not hidden in such depths and is a folk etymological alteration of an otherwise familiar name. Possibly, herring was in the past applied to a fish we only now call this; compare the gloss sardinas: heringas!
Herring don’t live in the Mediterranean Sea, so that its name could not have been learned from the Romans. However, as early as 1665, it was suggested that herring is an alteration of Latin halec. The reflexes (continuations) of halec occur widely in the living Romance languages (for example, Italian alece and Spanish haleche), and dialectal forms are numerous. The halec/herring etymology has been repeated in countless books and articles. However, the two forms are not so similar as to be easily confused. Besides, the earliest meaning of halec ~ hallec ~ halex was something like fish soup or fish sauce. Later it did refer to a fish species, but not necessarily the herring.
The English word is usually understood as stemming from hæring or hering with a long vowel in the root because in Middle English, spelling variants with ee occur. Besides, some Modern Frisian cognates indicate an ancient long vowel. We will assume that the traditional point of view is correct. At present, the vowel in herring is short due to later processes. But the oldest German forms also had short a. Therefore, a convincing etymology should not only explain “where the word came from”; it should also account for the variation long æ ~ short a. Such niceties didn’t interest pre-nineteenth-century scholars. Nor do they interest the modern public, but unless sound correspondences have been taken into account, all conclusions will have the solidity of castles in the air.
Vowels alternate in Germanic; compare write ~ wrote, bind ~ bound, drink ~ drank, steal ~ stole, give ~ gave, and many others. But they do so according to strict rules. Every series (like i ~ a ~ u in sing ~ sang ~ sung) resembles a railway track and the “trains” (vowels) are not allowed to change their routes. Every case of derailment shows that the pointsman/switchman (pointsperson?) — that is, the etymologist — made a mistake and paired incompatible forms. Despite such draconian rules, two views of derailment exist. Since accidents tend to recur (one can detect a certain pattern in them), some linguists recognize such deviations as legitimate. Others are stricter and believe that “wrong” alternations trace to an unrecorded, prehistoric language (“substrate”), in which different rules prevailed and from which Germanic speakers borrowed the words in question. The variation long æ ~ short a is not allowed in Germanic. Hence the predictable conclusion that herring is a “substrate word.” This, as noted above, may be true but since reference to a substrate is a dead end (the language is lost beyond recovery), relatively few scholars are in a hurry to move in that direction.
The main conjectures about the origin of herring are as follows. Herring swim in gigantic shoals and the fish name has been compared with the Germanic word for “army, troops,” such as German Heer, from heri (the word has not survived in English, but its root is extant in harbor, harangue, harry, and possibly harlot). In the past, it had a short root vowel, which makes it unfit for explaining the English word. By the way, some sources give Latin halec with long a. I am not sure why they do so; the best dictionaries cite halec with short a and long e. The etymology connecting herring with Heer (from heri) was proposed in the middle of the nineteenth century by the famous philologist Karl Müllenhoff and popularized by Friedrich Kluge, the author of the best German etymological dictionary. Apart from the difficulty with the vowel length, the problem with Müllenhoff’s guess is that heri never meant “shoal” (at least it has not turned up with this sense).
The other putative cognates of herring have long vowels. One of them is hair (Old Engl. hær ~ her, with long æ ~ e). Dutch haar also means “fishbone” and this is probably the reason the hair/herring etymology occurred to a Dutch scholar. However, the bones of the herring are neither too thin nor particularly fine, and persuasive parallels of fish being named for its “herring bone motif” have not been found. Yet this etymology keeps finding ever new supporters. One of them refers to folklore. In the tales of the world, the herring is often associated with the sun, which is usually depicted as a round face with the rays “radiating” (as they should) from the face; every ray is allegedly like a hair. Still another conjecture combines the elements of the previous two. Hair was believed to be a (or even the) source of strength, so it was surmised that hair in the name of the herring alludes to the great size of the shoal.
Who said that every herring drawn across our path is gray? Image by Lupo. Creative Commons License.
I will skip a fanciful etymology proposed by a distinguished scholar and only say that he attempted to find a Latin cognate of herring; this approach has little to recommend it. By contrast, the hypothesis by Otto Schrader, once a famous author, though now remembered only by specialists, deserves serious consideration. He compared herring and hoar (hoary). Engl. hoary, from har (with long a), means “gray-haired; grayish-white,” and so do its Scandinavian cognates. This link looks realistic; the herring is certainly “greyish-white.” If kipper, a word no less obscure than herring, is related to copper, with reference to the color of the male salmon, Schrader’s etymology finds additional confirmation, but no trust should be put in the support of one mystery by another. Fish often get their names with allusion to their color, spots, stripes, and so forth. For various reasons, similar things happen elsewhere in people’ interaction with the animal kingdom. From an etymological point of view, the bear is “a brown one” and the hare “a gray one” (like the herring?).Unfortunately, now the forms with a short vowel remain in limbo. None of the proposed explanations shed light on this vexing problem. The influence of Latin halec has again been pressed into service, but it is better to forget that word. Then there is the substrate hypothesis, about which nothing can be said except for mentioning it. Fish names are often susceptible to taboo. The protoform of herring with a long vowel must have sounded approximately like hairingaz. Perhaps in some places it was changed deliberately to haringaz. Or perhaps in great trading centers, places in which pidgins are common, hairingaz was occasionally simplified to haringaz. More castles in the air.
Whatever the origin of herring, we should account not only for the root but also for the suffix. (It is a common fault of etymology that even seasoned scholars make do with a specious explanation of the stem and ignore the rest of the word.) The suffix -ing had a variety of meanings, but if one defines the most general one as “belonging to,” one won’t make a serious error. It is easy to understand why some linguists who thought of her- as referring to a shoal, glossed herring as “a fish in a shoal.” But even if we stay with “gray,” we will get an acceptable result, namely “a fish belonging to a gray multitude,” for in Old English -ing could be added to adjectives. The herring will emerge as a perfect partner of the whiting. Those are all shots in the dark. Yet I hope that, although we did not hit the target, once or twice we were close to it.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology posts via email or RSS.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the
The sleeping giant wakes
Napoleon’s famous remark about China — “There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world” — has achieved a new lease of life in the context of China’s remarkable growth since the death of Mao in 1976. Since then, China has registered a real GDP growth of more than 2,000%, it has some $2 trillion in foreign reserves, a million Chinese emigrants now work in Africa on behalf of Chinese economic interests there, China’s military power (land, sea, and air) is growing at around 12% annually, and its non-financial overseas direct investment is currently in excess of $330 billion, to mention just a few of the statistics that usually appear on this topic.
But over and above such facts and figures, some observers detect more assertive Chinese foreign and defence policies. At that same time that China engages in joint naval exercises with Russia, those two states are blocking Security Council resolutions on Syria. Increasing naval patrols coincide with aggressive acts by its fishing fleet around islands in the South China and East China Seas, where it has ongoing territorial disputes with the Philippines, Japan, and other states. All such moves are backed by more oppressive policies against any signs of internal dissent and “punishments” ranging from diplomatic snubs to economic sanctions for states daring to receive the Dalai Lama as a visitor or criticise China’s human rights policies. Amongst other consequences, such manoeuvring has prompted a stronger response from the United States, including more naval excursions to the region and a clear statement from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the US has “a national interest in freedom of navigation … in the South China Sea.”
Another aspect of China’s rise that concerns some Western commentators is the possibility that China has developed a politico-economic approach that, for the first time in 500 years, poses a fundamental challenge to the foundations of Western dominance — so-called state capitalism, where, as Chinese premier Wen Jiabao put it in 2008, the “complete formulation of our economic policy is to give full play to the basic role of market forces in allocating resources under the macroeconomic guidance and regulation of the government.” Fukuyama’s End of History rhetoric assumed that, through the combination of capitalism and Western political values, including democracy, the rule of law and civil and political liberties had finally won the day over all alternatives. In effect, China is saying, especially to developing states, that there is in fact an alternative, one with a particular appeal to elites. It brings prosperity without the need for troublesome attempts to build “good governance” along Western lines, a policy that tended to accompany Western economic aid after the end of the Cold War.
So are we facing as some in the West fear a threat that, like the Soviet Union in the Cold War days, possesses formidable military power, but unlike the Soviet Union, has discovered a politico-economic model that poses a fundamental challenge to the West? Might that challenge include the possibility of a major conflict in the next few decades over issues like China’s claim to Taiwan or its territorial disputes, a conflict that China would probably win?
While China will always defend its interests robustly and its economic and military power will continue to grow, there are several reasons for being cautiously optimistic about both questions. First, China’s prosperity is heavily dependent on its trade and it has therefore been careful not to allow its disputes to damage that. Taiwan is more valuable to it as an independent entity, although China will always resist the possibility of a sovereign state of Taiwan emerging. Similarly, Beijing has recently begun negotiating a free trade pact with Japan and South Korea, while in the case of another potential regional foe, China is India’s largest trading partner. Secondly, China’s version of state capitalism has begun to encounter significant problems. There is massive corruption amongst the officials charged with administering the system and there have been mounting difficulties with the various technological and environmental risks that inevitably accompany rapid expansion. China has also gone from having one of the most equal distributions of wealth in the world to having one of the worst, with more than 100 million people living in extreme poverty. If it maintains its ban on families having more than one child, China faces a demographic timebomb by 2065, when current estimates anticipate that 54% of the population will be over 60 and only 22% working.
Thirdly, economic growth has produced a growing middle class whose demands for better educational facilities for their children, more freedom, and possibly, much greater democracy will increasingly dominate the political agenda. Until recently, when issues relating to the transition of power this year led to a crackdown on dissent, Chinese leaders (especially Premier Wen Jiabao) have tended to call for greater democracy and other political reforms. Finally, although China has attempted to build up its “soft power” by various means, including its sponsorship of Confucius Institutes around the world, it is not, in this respect, in the same league as the United States, nor is that a foreseeable possibility for many years. For all the unpopularity of some of its recent military ventures, the United States still has some ten times the military might of China and retains in its political system, the dynamism of its form of capitalism, the attraction of its language and culture, and its global dominance of the internet, which all amount to vastly greater soft power resources than China.
David Armstrong has held academic positions at Birmingham University, where he was co-founder and first Director of the Graduate School of International Studies; Durham University, where he was Research Director; and Exeter University, where he was Head of Department. He is founder/editor of Diplomacy and Statecraft, editor of the Review of International Studies, and Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in International Relations.
Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only current affairs articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Religion versus science…
Intellectual debates which command rock-star levels of mass appeal are rare, to say the least, but ‘religion versus science’ can still pull in the crowds like the best of the old stadium bands. It goes without saying that an Oxford debate between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Richard Dawkins in February this year was packed out on the day, but it’s now also currently near 30,000 hits on YouTube.
Click here to view the embedded video.
But just like a Status Quo concert, it’s really the old standards that keep this sort of thing going: the problem of evil, unweaving the rainbow, Darwin’s revolution, etc. Dawkins’s The God Delusion, to take the most notorious example, is now eight years old and was hardly the first time Dawkins had put this type of argument in a bestseller. Nowadays, these ‘religion versus science’ events, and the bestsellers that accompany them, often seem less a debate and more a slightly hollowed-out ritual.
William James, writing over a hundred years ago, did not recognize the antagonism between religion and ‘popular science’. Indeed, he was a popular scientist of formidable credentials himself. He’d trained at the Harvard Medical School, before using his extensive professional knowledge of physiology and particularly neurology to become one of the pioneers of the emergent science of psychology. He’s probably better known today as Henry James’s brother, and also as a key philosopher in the American pragmatist tradition. But as he confessed, he couldn’t really get on with his brother’s novels and pragmatism was an enthusiasm that he developed relatively late in his career. It may be that we’ve undervalued the areas where James might most effectively speak to us now. In fact, at the time of writing his best-known work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, we find him at the tipping point between psychologist and philosopher — a productive tipping point for him, but also for us.
William James, via Wikimedia Commons
The Varieties was based on a series of lectures James gave in Edinburgh in 1901-2, and as the name implies, it looks at a huge and heterodox range of testimonies united by one common thread. They’re all grounded in the experiences of individuals who are in some way exploring their relationship with what they consider to be ‘the divine’. Today, a lot of discussion of experiences like this (be they religious conversions, mystical experiences, or simply vaguer feelings of ‘some kind of presence’) basically cast them as symptomatic of a mental dysfunction, or of a wider anxiety or lack. ‘Individuals in asylums think they are Napoleon or Charlie Chaplin’, Dawkins says at one point in The God Delusion; ‘religious experiences are different only in that the people who claim them are more numerous.’ This is patently the language of psychology and not evolutionary biology, but the interesting thing is that James, a psychologist, doesn’t actually disagree that much. Indeed, he’s the first to recognize that pathological mental abnormality lies at the heart of much religious experience. (He calls the founder of Quakerism George Fox a ‘psychopath’ at one point!)
What he absolutely can’t accept is that having ‘diagnosed’ a religious feeling (i.e. having established a physical or psychological cause for it), we’re bound then to the view that science has ‘solved’ it or indeed finished with it. To assign a cause, says James, is not the same thing as defining something’s essential character, let alone its worth. Just as we wouldn’t say that we’ve ‘solved’ a painting, for example, by discovering that the artist painted it because he or she desperately needed the money that week. What James does throughout the Varieties is to probe the shortfall between the rich variety of our experience and the thin partiality of our attempts to explain it by recourse to terminology, abstraction, and authority. He’s constantly worried that we’re being encouraged by a certain type of scientific analysis to put our faith in abstracted explanations, often at the expense of our own experiences — the only things that we can truly know anyway. In the Varieties James is examining the emotional fundamentals not only of religious belief, but of all belief. And now, when we live with a constantly re-staged theatre of antipathy between religion and science, it might be that a book which reminds us how provisional, how contingent, how emotional, but also how enriching are the foundations on which we all build our beliefs about the world around us… Well, it might just be helpful in moving us on a bit.
Dr Matthew Bradley is a Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, which published this month.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the
July 10, 2012
The Wartime Presidency
In 2012, the American people will choose between two candidates for the Oval Office who share in common something unusual — neither one has ever spent a day in a military uniform. No presidential election since 1944 has featured two major party candidates with no military experience. The absence of a candidate with time in the military has led some to bemoan the separation between civilian life and military service. But the more immediate concern should be whether a lack of military experience has an impact on how well a president performs as a wartime leader.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt greeting Hon. Anthony Eden during the Quebec Conference, August 1943. National Film Board of Canada. Library and Archives Canada.
A quick glance at the record of wartime commanders in chief suggests that prior military service doesn’t correlate closely with success. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt rank as our most accomplished wartime commanders in chief. Neither had significant military experience. Lincoln served as a militia officer for a few weeks during the Blackhawk War and never heard a shot fired in anger. Roosevelt never served. On the other side of the coin, some of the least successful wartime leaders spent time in the military during earlier conflicts. In the Second World War, Lyndon B. Johnson found himself in a B-17 bomber as it fought off an attack by Japanese fighters; Richard Nixon was in the Navy in the same war; and George W. Bush was a National Guard pilot during the Vietnam War.
A military background matters little for a wartime president because most of the core leadership tasks he must accomplish are political in nature, not military. For starters, a president has to decide whether to take the nation to war or accept that a conflict is unavoidable. This calculation reflects a judgment about the national interest, specifically, whether the security of the American people requires recourse to arms. Although the choice should be informed by an appreciation of the potential cost in human terms of military action, an evaluation that combat experience may sharpen, the decision depends more heavily on an assessment of the economic, political, and social consequences of a possible conflict.
Once a president chooses war, he needs to lay the foundation for success, which includes securing public support, forging alliances or coalitions against the adversary, and mobilizing economic resources. Note, again, that the skills a president needs are political and perhaps organizational, not military. Knowing when to ask Congress for a resolution of support for military intervention involves ongoing conversations with lawmakers. Inducing a reluctant ally to join a coalition in support of an American-led military operation may require hard bargaining and concessions on goals or side payments of some kind. Prior military service won’t help a president navigate his way through the political and diplomatic thickets he may encounter.
Wars seek political goals, not merely battlefield success. So a president needs to frame the broader national objectives he seeks in going to war, and then he has to tailor military strategy, operations, and tactics to meet the ends he has identified. This is probably the single task for which military knowledge would be most useful. But the kind of military expertise a president most needs is the sort that senior officers acquire over the course of a military career. Our presidents who served in uniform did so only briefly, leaving the military to pursue politics. The rare exceptions — Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight Eisenhower — never faced war when they finally reached the White House.
National objectives may include ambitious goals for a new postwar order or the political transformation of a defeated enemy. Here again the tasks are much more political than military. Yes, American troops may need to preserve order after the shooting stops, and it will help if a president can call upon advisors with postwar peacekeeping experience. But this type of expertise is readily available to the Oval Office.
Some of the most vexing challenges a president faces during wartime are diplomatic in character. Presidents struggle to keep allies on the same page, especially client regimes that depend on American aid. The United States has been frustrated by the governments it has supported in Saigon, Baghdad, and Kabul. Yet there is no reason to think that an earlier stint in the military would help a president better deal with a Nguyen Van Thieu or Hamid Karzai, especially when US ambassadors who were career soldiers tore out their hair in frustration at trying to influence the conduct of client regimes.
Finally, a president has to maintain the backing of the American people for the war. Failure to do so puts victory (the accomplishment of his political goals) beyond reach. This task too is a political one, for which military service offers no particular preparation. Public support hinges on recognizing what to ask of the public, and when. Presidents need to find the right language to explain their goals, justify the sacrifices of war, and answer their critics. Few have managed to strike the right chord. Those who did, Lincoln and Roosevelt in particular, were gifted politicians first and foremost.
Leading the nation successfully in wartime, as it turns out, involves accomplishing tasks that are more political than military. Prior military service might make for an attractive candidate. But the best wartime leaders were never soldiers. They were just great at politics.
Andrew J. Polsky is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. A former editor of the journal Polity, his most recent book is Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War. Read his previous blog posts: “Obama v. Romney on Afganistan strategy,” “Mitt Romney as Commander in Chief: some troubling signs,” “Muddling counterinsurgency’s impact,” “To be Commander-in-Chief,” and “Presidents, protest, and patriotism.”
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only law and politics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only American history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the
Protestantism in Hollywood
Hollywood and Christianity often seem to be at war. There is a long list of movies that have attracted religious condemnation, from Gone with the Wind with its notorious “damn,” to The Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ.
In his latest book, historian and award-winning commentator William Romanowski explores the complicated and remarkable relationship between Protestants and the American film industry. In it he reveals the surprising story of how mainline church leaders opposed government censorship, preferring instead self-regulation by both the industry and individual conscience.
Click here to view the embedded video.
William Romanowski is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College. His books include Reforming Hollywood: American Protestants and the Movies, Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture (a 2002 ECPA Gold Medallion Award Winner) and Pop Culture Wars: Religion and the Role of Entertainment in America Life.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only television and film articles on on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the
Snail attacks pencil
On the Pacific coast of Costa Rica a major predator in the community of animals living on sandy beaches is a snail, a species of Olive Shell (Agaronia propatula). This snail moves up and down the beach by ‘surfing’, extending its foot so that it is carried along in the wave swash. It is a voracious hunter and its main prey is a smaller species of Olive Shell. In its wave-washed environment it has to act quickly. It pounces on its prey, ‘swallows’ it into a pouch in its foot, then burrows into the sand where it can eat it undisturbed. A recent study by Dr Winfried Peters and his team (Indiana/Purdue University at Fort Wayne, USA, and Goldring Marine Biology Station, Costa Rica) has revealed that these predatory snails are quite indiscriminate in their attacking behaviour. They will tackle almost any moving objects including paper-clips, cotton-swabs and pencil-sized pieces of plastic, attempting to engulf them. Not even the toes of unwary bathers are safe!
Click here to view the embedded video.
Winfried S. Peters is the author of “The Behavioural and Sensory Ecology of Agaronia Propatula (caenogastropoda: olividae), a swash-surfing predator on the sandy beaches of the panamic faunal province” with Ariel Z. Cyrus, Samantha D. Rupert, Amy S. Silva, Monika Graf, Jeremy C. Rappaport, and Frank V. Paladino in the Journal of Molluscan Studies. Dr. Peters specializes in plant cell and developmental biology, focusing on the biomechanics of cells and organs; kinematic growth analysis (quantification of spatio-temporal growth patterns); long-distance transport of photoassimilates in the phloem; structure and function of calcium-driven contractile proteins in plants; history of plant physiology and cell biology.
The Journal of Molluscan Studies accepts papers on all aspects of the study of molluscs. These include systematics, molecular biology, palaeontology, ecology, physiology and many other areas. The Journal of Molluscan Studies is published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Malacological Society of London.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only articles on environmental and life sciences on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Reflecting on 50 years of the Rolling Stones
This Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of the debut performance of the Rolling Stones at London’s Marquee club on Thursday, 12 July 1962. After putting out their first single two years later, the Rolling Stones would go on to release over two dozen studio albums, over 100 singles, and numerous compilation and live albums. We asked some staff at Oxford for their favorite Rolling Stones songs and why they think they’re so great; read on for their answers.
“19th Nervous Breakdown” (1966)
I’m a sucker for early Stones. I especially love the unrelenting guitar riff in the verse of “19th Nervous Breakdown,” the feedback leading into “Here it comes,” and the surf guitar riff at the end of the song. It all combines to give the song a sense of frenetic energy, barely under control. I’m trying to teach myself this song on guitar now, but I’m finding it hard to catch that balance point between order and chaos that gives the song its momentum. The Stones get it perfectly.
– Anna-Lise Santella, Editor of Grove Music/Oxford Music Online
Click here to view the embedded video.
“Paint It, Black” (1966)
My favorite Stones song is 1966’s “Paint It, Black,” which I remember first hearing on the radio when I was a small kid in the ’80s. The twanging sitar, driving beat, and sinuous minor-key melodies opened up new musical possibilities to my young ears. Definitely an epiphanic moment for me.
– Meg Wilhoite, Assistant Editor for Grove Music/Oxford Music Online
Despite the depressing theme, it’s my favorite Stones song because my dad always sings it. From the poetic lyrics to the great melody and vocals, it really embodies rock and roll of that age.
– Lana Goldsmith, Associate Publicist
Click here to view the embedded video.
“Honky Tonk Woman” (1969)
Whenever I hear “Honky Tonk Woman,” I cannot resist dancing to it. It’s got quintessential raunchy lyrics with covert references to sex and coke, great back beat, a bluesy texture, and a great refrain that everyone chants while dancing. It’s got everything that’s great about the Stones!
– Joan Bossert, Vice President/Editorial Director in the academic medical division
Click here to view the embedded video.
“Rocks Off” & “Rip This Joint” (May 1972)
Now, technically I’m breaking the rules here by choosing two songs. But the fact is that these tracks, which form the opening salvo of the Stones’ best album, Exile on Main Street, are inseparable. No other rock band has ever come close to matching the energy of that moment when the sleazy, brassy come-on of ‘Rocks Off’ gives way to the manic charge of ‘Rip This Joint.’ It’s at this point that you know you’re not listening to just any record, but one of the greasiest, grittiest, most purely rock and roll recordings ever cut to magnetic tape. To be played loud & paired with good whiskey, neat.
— Owen Keiter, Publicity
Click here to view the embedded video.
“Beast of Burden” (1978)
The best song the Stones produced after the smoke of the 60s and 70s had cleared, and Keith Richards begun to emerge from the land of the dead (and it showed). Essentially it’s a song of gratitude — from Richards to Mick Jagger, whom he credits as having kept the band going while he, Richards, had vanished in the haze — but, in true Stones fashion, it is anthemic and snarling both.
– Tim Bent, Editor in the academic/trade division
Click here to view the embedded video.
“She’s So Cold” (1980)
In my freshman year of college, my friends and I would always end up rocking out to “She’s So Cold” during late-night homework sessions in our dorm.
–Caelyn Cobb, Assistant Editor for Music, Dance, and Politics in the academic/trade division
Click here to view the embedded video.
Did your favorite song make the list? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
Alyssa Bender joined Oxford University Press as a marketing assistant in July 2011. She works on academic/trade history, literature, and music titles, and tweets @OUPMusic.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Use of the The Rolling Stones (album) by the artist The Rolling Stones [Copyright Decca/ABKCO / London/ABKCO] to illustrate the audio recording in question under fair use.
Oxford University Press's Blog
- Oxford University Press's profile
- 238 followers
