Oxford University Press's Blog, page 109

The power of pigs: tension and taboo in Haifa, Israel

It might be an exaggeration to say a boar broke the internet. But when someone posted an image of wild boar sleeping on a mattress and surrounded by garbage from a recently-raided dumpster in Haifa, Israel in March, Twitter briefly erupted.

Not everyone is thrilled about Haifa’s suid inhabitants, which roam the city, eat trash, and sometimes attack people. In a recent article in The New York Times, Patrick Kingsley documents the uneasy relationship, not only between people and pigs, but also between the people who want the animals eliminated and those who welcome them. In a country plagued by bitter resentments, boar added one more thing to fight about.

One can appreciate the differences of opinion. Wild boar are magnificent animals, with thick brown hair, long snouts, and deep-set, intelligent eyes. They are also dangerous. Growing to 100kg or more, they can charge when cornered or startled. Worse, males grow razor-sharp tusks that turn their heads into massive spiked clubs.

But the power of pigs lies in their symbolic significance far more than their morphology.

In documenting the divisiveness surrounding boar, Kingsley curiously omits an important detail. The drama over the fate of Haifa’s boar plays out against a backdrop of taboo and religious law.

Pigs and wild boar are the taboo animal par excellence in Judaism and Islam. They are banned repeatedly in both the Quran and the Torah. At the same time, the New Testament makes pork available to Christians as food. These contradictory positions on pigs have elicited intense reactions born out of disgust, tradition, and prejudice for millennia. Such emotions are fueled by and in turn feed conflicts. They exacerbate resentments and all too often lead to acts of humiliation and terror.

Take for example, the story told in II Maccabees 7. Around 167 BC, in the midst of a crackdown on Jewish traditions in the Seleucid empire, a Jewish woman and her sons are arrested and commanded to eat pork or die. They choose death. True or apocryphal, such steadfast adherence to Jewish law exemplifies the religious and nationalist zeal that would ultimately lead to the establishment of the Jewish Hasmonean Kingdom.

Pork-centered bigotry did not end with the Seleucids. The Romans, who conquered the Hasmoneans in 63 BC, widely mocked Jewish customs. A millennium and a half later, the Inquisition demanded Jews and Muslims not only to eat pork, but also enjoy it, in order to prove their conversion to Christianity. Today, there are more episodes than one can count of people terrorizing mosques, synagogues, and community centers with pig body parts or pork products.

Oppression is not always of pig-eaters against pig-abstainers. In 2009, amidst fears of the H1N1 “Swine Flu” outbreak, the Egyptian government, against the advice of the WHO, culled hundreds of thousands of pigs that belonged to Christian trash collectors, the Zabaleen. Pigs represented a substantial part of the Zabaleen’s livelihood; their loss threatened an already marginalized community with crippling poverty.

Haifa is often held up as exemplary of an integrated city in Israel. Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Russian are spoken on its streets. Over a third of the roughly 20,000 students at the University of Haifa are Arab-Israeli. Compared to more segregated cities like Jerusalem, Haifa looks like a model of what Israel could be.

Nevertheless, several social fault lines run through the city. Jews and Arabs may both call the city home, but the relationship between them is tense and very unequal. Discrimination and mutual avoidance are commonplace. The (mostly Jewish) rich and famous live in the Denia neighborhood on the slopes of Mt. Carmel, while Arab neighborhoods such as al-Khalisa experience poverty and high crime rates.

Fault lines run through the Jewish communities as well. Haifa’s Russian-Israelis and Ethiopian-Israelis (Beta Israel), who arrived via state-supported aliya programs, are concentrated in neighborhoods such as Kiryat Haim that suffer from crime and neglect. Both Jewish groups face discrimination and police harassment, epitomized by the 2019 shooting of Solomon Teka in Kiryat Haim and the nation-wide protests that followed.

The growing Haredim (“ultra-Orthodox”) community is (self-)segregated from the more secular Jewish communities. The two broad sections of the Jewish population have long disagreed over the appropriate political and cultural trajectory for Israel, with the Haredim more recently showing themselves to be ardent supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government. As Haredim move in larger numbers into Haifa neighborhoods such as Naveh Sha’anan, tensions have followed.

As in so much of the developed world, economic inequality is high in Israel, which sports a Gini coefficient around 0.39, similar to the United States (0.41). Neoliberal policies within the “Start-Up Nation” have hollowed out all semblance of solidarity. An upwardly-mobile and cosmopolitan class fattens their pockets while the working class, often separated from the upper class not only by income but also by ethnic background, is beset by high costs of living and frustrated ambitions.

For now, the wild boar are equal-opportunity offenders in Haifa. They invade rich and poor neighborhoods alike. One can hope that the need to address the problems posed by wild boar will bring together people from different sectors of Haifa society. Perhaps the search for a solution endorsed by multiple stakeholders will help build trust among various groups. Or perhaps the growing disagreements about the pigs will fall along existing fault lines, aggravating the existing animosities and becoming one more element in Israel’s multi-front culture war.

The lesson of pigs over the past two and half millennia is more than just to demonstrate that in highly unequal societies, those with power exploit, murder, and humiliate those without. Or that different ethnic and religious groups are wont to disagree, especially when wealth is not equally shared. It is that pigs, because of their unique history in the Middle East and the contradictory position of being a source of food for some and pollution for others, possess an almost uncanny ability to insert themselves into existing social conflicts. They often become the focus of conflict, or even metonymic of social tension. It is this recurring role that has given the pig taboo its unique power in Judaism and Islam. If history is any indication, the power of pigs will transform what is now an ecological debate about wild animals in Haifa into a conflict that further separates people within an already divided society.

Feature image by Kevin Jackson from Unsplash.

Transformative choice and “Big Decisions”

Imagine being invited by a trusted friend to a “life-changing” event. Should you go? Your friend says her life has been transformed by such events and you believe her. The event could be a church service, self-help talk, concert, movie, festival, hike, play, dinner party, book club, union organizing meeting, etc.: whatever you find easiest to allow unfolding such that you are likely to be changed in some fundamental way. Do you go? Why or why not? What sorts of considerations do you reach for in making your choice?

Most prominently in her book Transformative Experience (OUP, 2014), the philosopher L. A. Paul has put problems like these, termed transformative choices, on the map for philosophical and scientific inquiry. Focusing on some exemplary cases, such as that of whether to become a parent, Paul has argued that there may not be satisfactory reasons available for making transformative choices, at least given certain common assumptions, some of which are codified in standard decision theory.

The problem of how to make transformative choices is not simply a philosophical one, but rather a predicament that can arise for anyone in their daily life. Nor is Paul the first philosopher to identify the force of this problem. Prior to Paul’s work, Edna Ullmann-Margalit also discussed the phenomenon of transformative decision-making, and identified some of the philosophical  issues it raises (see the essay “Big Decisions”, reprinted in her Normal Rationality, OUP, 2017). While Paul and others have duly acknowledged Ullmann-Margalit’s work, we believe it remains underappreciated for what it can add to current discussions, and wish here to continue amplifying her distinctive contribution. Of particular interest is the detailed framework that Ullmann-Margalit constructs for making sense of transformative choices. As our way into this framework, let’s begin by considering what rational choice generally involves.

“The problem of how to make transformative choices is not simply a philosophical one, but rather a predicament that can arise for anyone in their daily life.”

To be rational in your choices, you need to make the best decisions you can. Best by what measure? This is controversial, of course, but one common answer is that the best choice in a given situation is the one that wins a pro/con contest, i.e., the one that has the strongest upside once all the downsides have been considered. “Standard decision theory” is a formalization of this plausible idea. Assuming certain things about our beliefs and desires or preferences, decision theory gives us quantified expected values for each choice under consideration. The option with the highest expected value is the rational one to choose.

Some of the assumptions that are necessary to achieve this calculus are stronger and more questionable than others. And the problem of transformative choice can be thought of as challenging particular assumptions of this framework. But sometimes people chafe at the very idea that crucial decisions like parenting can be construed merely as an exercise of weighing pros and cons. Ullman-Margalit has a compelling diagnosis of this felt resistance, proceeding from her account of transformative choice.

Planning groceries for the week is a good example of a kind of decision-making that most everyone could agree is adequately covered by standard decision theory. You’ve got some stable preferences, plus expectations about price and availability. Your decisions each week may be subject to such things as your bank account balance, the time you have to shop, whether you’re tired of a certain dish, the unexpected availability of certain items, etc. The question of how to adjust your list each week seems unobjectionably subject to a cost/benefit calculation and is easily modeled by standard decision theory. Ullmann-Margalit categorizes choices like these as “medium” decisions and agrees that it’s possible to approach them rationally in this way.

In contrast with making your list, the activity of actually finding your listed items at the grocery store is full of decisions that Ullmann-Margalit calls “small.” Which box of corn flakes should you pick out of all the identical ones before you? The usual calculus doesn’t apply here, except trivially. Sure, you face a problem of selecting which item to reach for, but it would make no sense at all to deliberate over the possibilities. As opposed to genuinely “choosing,” Ullmann-Margalit says that we simply pick which box to take off the shelf. What the example helpfully provides is a relatively uncontroversial example of a decision problem for which it would be a mistake to employ the standard decision calculus as a tool.

“When we approach ‘medium’ decisions, we evaluate our options and the different considerations for each. But with ‘big’ decisions we are faced with the possibility of altering the very mindset on the basis of which medium decisions are made.”

“Big” decisions are the other area where standard decision theory sometimes seems to break down, but now for much more interesting reasons. For big decisions are the ones that threaten to transform the very basis on which we choose what to do. When we approach “medium” decisions, we evaluate our options and the different considerations for each. But with “big” decisions we are faced with the possibility of altering the very mindset on the basis of which medium decisions are made—and it can be hard to see how such a choice can itself be made rationally, at least by the lights of standard decision theory. To extend our metaphor, suppose you have a friend from a different culture. Their approach to food procurement is very different, with divergent food preferences being just a start. Suppose it was an option to change your preferences, beliefs, habits, etc. to be like theirs. Or suppose that something you did really want to do, such as spending a lot of time with this friend and her family, would likely have the side-effect of changing you in just these ways. Many people will find something inappropriate in the idea of subjecting such decisions to a cost-benefit calculus. Ullmann-Margalit suggests that this is because such a thing is really impossible: in order to perform this analysis you’d need to base it on your current mindset, and yet this mindset is just what the choice is going to change!

In her work, Ullmann-Margalit calls the pool of resources we draw on in decision-making our rationality base. Big decisions, or transformative choices, are those which promise to alter our rationality base in some crucial and irreversible way. Many philosophers talk, as we have above, about our rationality base as composed of beliefs and desires. Standard decision theory employs the language of credences and preferences. Many outside of those contexts would talk about commitments and values. The problem of transformative choice can be put in any of these terms. In the wake of a transformative choice, the choice-maker is left with values, desires, preferences (or whatever else) that either contrast with, or simply don’t make sense from the perspective of, the values, desires, preferences, etc. that she had beforehand, and that she relied on in making the choice. Yet choose we must—or, opt we must, as Ullman-Margalit prefers to put it. (As with small decisions where standard decision theory is deemed inapplicable and so we “pick” rather than “choose”, Ullmann-Margalit says that we “opt” in cases where decisions are big enough to overwhelm our rationality bases.) In transformative decision making we cannot opt rationally, but Ullmann-Margalit holds out hope that we can at least be reasonable in what we opt to do. Whether, or how, one might opt reasonablywhen faced with a transformative choice remains an open question.

Featured image by Victoriano Izquierdo via  Unsplash

Etymologies in bulk and in bunches

Two things sometimes come as a surprise even to an experienced etymologist. First, it may turn out that such words happen to be connected as no one would suspect of having anything in common. Second is the ability of words to produce one another in what seems to be an arbitrary, capricious, or chaotic way, so that the entire group begins to resemble an analog of a creeping plant (think of an ivy-covered wall). I don’t mean trivial derivatives like standing, stood, understand, or even the horrifying standee from stand. The production of those derivatives is governed by rules.

More enigmatic are the ties that were the object of my recent post (21 April 2021): the wanderings from limp to lump and Dutch lomp “rag” and of all of them to clump and slump, if not to lim-b. As I wrote in the limp ~ lump essay, though some suggestions look plausible, nothing can be proved. Hence the justified but irritating verdict in dictionaries: “Origin uncertain” (not unknown but uncertain!). As ill luck would have it, the sought-for origin will never become certain. The other astounding situation can perhaps be called: “Unexpected connections.” It occurs when a researcher is told that clock and cloak are two variants of the same noun (the common denominator is the bell-shaped form of a cloak; clocks were also connected with bells). Really? Yes, indeed.

The English word balk provides us with both surprise and irritation. I’ll begin with the surprising aspect of its etymology. The noun balc ~ balca “ridge” turned up in Old English texts and is believed to be a borrowing from Old Norse (the attested form in Old Icelandic is balkr “partition,” with short a, not, as often written, bálkr, with long a, which is the word’s  modern form; balkr alternated with bölkr). In following the history of the English word, we should observe that in the sixteenth century, balk (or baulk) acquired the sense “obstacle, hindrance” and even earlier, the verb balk “to stop at the obstacle” was recorded.

Not to be balked. (Image by Mabel Amber, CC BY-NC 2.0)

The cognates of the noun balk “obstacle” were and still are known all over Germanic. West Germanic balk also made its way into Old French. It is known today as bau “beam” and seems to have returned to English in debauch ~ debauchery. French dictionaries exercise caution and add probably to this derivation. Yet Old French desbaucher “to lead astray” might mean “to get over a bar, obstacle, hindrance (“balk”), go beyond a permitted limit; to know no restraint.” Earnest Weekley refused to commit himself to the Germanic etymology of debauch but did not find the suggestion given above improbable and cited delirium as a parallel. Indeed, in delirium (straight from Latin) de– is a prefix, and līra means “a ridge between furrows.” As regards delirium, Weekley thought that we are dealing with a plowing metaphor and cited the modern phrase to run off the rails, along with its German equivalent.  (Weekley, it should be remembered, was the author of a series of excellent popular books on English words. They appeared a century ago but are not a bit outdated.) If ba(u)lk and debauch are related, this is indeed a surprise!

We can now look at how words sprout new words (an analog of asexual propagation). Alongside balk (verb), to bilk “defraud, elude” exists. It surfaced in the seventeenth century, has a slangy tinge, and nothing is known about its origin. The only hypothesis, repeated in dictionaries with or without caveats, is that bilk is the product of a symbolic thinning of the vowel a in balk, that is, to bilk is understood as “to balk in a small way.” Quite possible! Sound symbolism, along with sound imitation, is a recurring theme in this blog. The vowel i is famous for producing the impression of smallness. If asked about riffraff or knick–knack, everybody will say the progression is from something small to something big. Why then not bilk–balk? And what about bulk? This is a tougher case.

Wild partying but no debauchery. (Image by Max Titov on Unsplash)

Bulk “stall” is the continuation of the same Old Norse balkr and won’t interest us. In the other noun bulk, etymological dictionaries distinguish three very close senses as possibly unrelated: “cargo,” “mass, volume,” and again “volume, mass.” The division is confusing, and we will let it be. The first sense is (again!) a borrowing from Old Norse (Old Icelandic bulki; búlki, is the modern form). Not improbably, k is here a suffix or some sort of extension, the root being b-l “to swell” (if so, then belly, ball, bull, and a host of other words belong here).

What about balk, our starting point? As we have seen, it contains the original concept of hindrance, not of swelling. Yet balk is related to Greek phálanx, whose initial sense must have been “many soldiers in a row.” Its nearest cognate is Greek phallos, certainly named for its ability to swell. At some point, the ideas of hindrance and swelling almost merge. Indeed, a ridge, a barrier is a kind of swelling impeding one’s progress.

Swollen, swollen! (Image by Walter Baxter, CC-BY-SA/2.0)

This semantic legerdemain may look unimpressive. Yet we observe that the idea of expansion underlies other b-k words. For example, Norwegian bunke means “cargo,” and English bunch once meant “hump, swelling.” Skeat cited Middle English bunchen “to beat” and wrote: “Probably imitative, like bump, bounce.” The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (at bunch) dismisses the problem with the answer: “Origin unknown.” However, one gets the impression that, as far as meaning is concerned, bunk- and bulk– (the latter a member of an extended family, while the former is an orphan) are related in some “symbolic” way, because the idea of swelling underlies both.

If the previous reasoning has any value, we will end up with the alternating roots b-l (k) ~ b-n (k), of which the first was more productive. Both English bulk and Norwegian bunke refer to “cargo.” When we look up bunk and bung in English etymological dictionaries, we find the same answers: “Origin unknown, of uncertain origin; perhaps sound-imitative; probably symbolic.” This is what I meant by asexual propagation. Words’ roots belonging to the same or similar semantic fields alternate, interact, “creep,” and produce distant or close synonyms. Thus, bulge (Latin bulga “leathern sack,” another swelling!), to cite one more example, probably “begat” bilge “the bottom of a ship’s hull” and “the dirt accumulated there.” Whence this b-l ~ b-n symbolism? Did it arise because b a labial sound, with bubbles and blowing appearing as its associates, while the sonorous l and n cling easily to a stop like b? This is perhaps a question for psycholinguists, rather than for etymologists, to answer. I’ll only risk saying that bulk, balk, bilk, along with bunk, and so forth form an extended family, whose members often fail to recognize one another.

In our vocabulary, upstarts are all over the place. They defy the laws of etymological algebra (proper ablaut and regular consonant alterations) and probably show the historian how human speech developed tens of thousands of years ago (sporadically, chaotically, by chance association) and illuminate some corners in the history of slang. Almost any hypothesis on their origin can be easily debunked, but the sheer volume of such words gives us pause. I am severely tempted to add binge to my story, but, knowing next to nothing about the word’s progress, will rather abstain.

Featured image by WikiImages from Pixabay

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Lyricism as activism: Sigurd Olson and The Singing Wilderness

On the northwestern side of the Great Lakes, at the border between the United States and Canada, there is a lake country called Quetico-Superior, known for its unsurpassed beauty and wilderness. This is the home of the influential environmentalist and writer Sigurd Olson (1899-1982). He served as President of the Wilderness Society and the National Parks Association, working also as a consultant to the government on wilderness preservation and ecological problems. At the same time, he earned popular acclaim for his books which brought him the highest achievement for the genre of nature writing, the John Burroughs Medal. Sigurd Olson merged his two passions so effortlessly that it is possible to view his lyricism as a form of—or a significant aspect of—his activism.

To my mind, Olson was able to write the story of the self in nature in the same way the greatest writers were able to write the story of the self in history. He relied on primitive methods of exploring the wilderness, gaining a spiritual and ethical perspective of his own place in the vastness of nature. The sense of reverence and the knowledge that one should not possess and subdue define his relationship with the wilderness and permeate his work. The following passage, about trying to get close to snow geese, from his memoir The Singing Wilderness, speaks to this:

Then they were directly above and I could see the outstretched necks with their white chin straps, the snowy undersides of the wings. …

They were much bigger than I had ever imagined. I could not only hear the beat of their wings and the rush of air through them, but could actually feel it. At that moment they seemed almost close enough to touch and I could see their eyes, the wary turning of their heads, their outstretched feet. …

As I look back, I could comfort the boy I was. I could tell him that one should never try to capture something as wild and beautiful as the calling of geese.

The Singing Wilderness celebrates the feelings of stability, peace, and joy nature brings to Olson’s life, and the ways in which unspoiled places create a closer relationship between him and other people. While he grieves the damage inflicted by industry, his writing maintains a tranquil tone. The memoir is structured symphonically, in four parts, corresponding to the seasons—each season a movement as Olson hears it and records it in short chapters. The book opens with the winds of March carrying the sounds of cracking ice as the earth begins to breathe deeply again, the “drumming” of the grouse, the frogs “tuning up in the little pond,” the hermit thrush with its “clear violin notes”; and ends with the timber wolf’s “long-drawn quavering howl from over the hills…wilderness music, something as free and untamed as there is on this earth.”

But before he sets out along the canyons, down the rivers, up the ridges, deep into forests, and across frozen lakes that mirror the Aurora Borealis, Olson tells us about his childhood encounter with the wilderness on the shores of Lake Michigan. This was an encounter that was to mark his life from the age of seven, till his death, while snowshoeing, late in life. He writes of that experience:

One day, all alone, I started out through woods I had never traversed. … I ran most of the long, winding trail, and when I burst at last out of the gloom I was frightened and breathless. Before me were space and a sparkling blue horizon, with no land as far as I could see. …

A school of perch darted in and out of the rocks. They were green and gold and black, and I was fascinated by their beauty. Seagulls wheeled and cried above me. Waves crashed against the pier. I was alone in a wild and lovely place, part at last of the wind and the water, part of the dark forest through which I had come, and of all the wild sounds and colors and feelings of the place I had found. That day I entered into a life of indescribable beauty and delight. There I believe I heard the singing wilderness for the first time.

I kept the pier a secret and stole away there as often as I could. It was the answer to all of my childish desires, a place of magic and wonder which belonged to me alone. My perceptions were uncluttered, my impressions were pure and uninfluenced, my feelings of closeness to nature and of sympathy with the creatures of the wild were true feelings. In them, I know now, was the ancient realization of oneness so hard to know or recognize as life becomes more involved.

The book takes us on a journey that sharpens the glimpsed “ancient realization of oneness” into clarity. The young boy who brings home to his grandmother a fresh-caught trout nestled on a bed of succulent leaves of cowslips at a breathless run, rehearses the memory as a man who tells us how to “winnow the morning air” and sense the scent “of pine and spruce and balsam when you can catch the wind blowing over a thousand miles of them.” There, away from it all, his “thoughts were long and undisturbed” as he drifted quietly in his canoe “along the shores, being a part of the rocks and the trees and every living thing.”

Olson evokes the purity and the restorative quality of time spent in the wilderness, watching “the smoky gold of the tamaracks,” and deciphering the “soft nasal twang” of the nuthatch or the calls of the loons. His approach to narrative is expressive and heuristic, rather than polemical. His employment of the visual, olfactive, and other sensory attributes of language help him to resuscitate the experience of being fully awake to all the life around. His writing sets every rustle in motion, every scent upon our senses, imprints every variation of color in our mind’s eye so that we discover for ourselves the profound joys of the natural world. The result is a restorative engagement with language. In reading, we perceive a profound gesture of tenderness and protective instinct toward nature, because Olson makes a gesture of tenderness in language.

The writing is intellectually moving. The experiences Olson revives for us serve to orient us as creatures of this earth: the green eyes of the wolves in the night only 50 feet away; the golden flash of the trout jumping up the river; the clam at the bottom of an ice hole that becomes mesmerizing while Olson and his friend wait for fish; the field mouse that slides again and again over the side of the tent for the simple purpose of playing; the heavy breath of the moose in a pool; the eighty years old beatific man fishing alone on his birthday; Olson’s son frolicking in the river; Olson’s wife praising his catch; and skating in the midst of the Northern lights that appear like Indians making wartime dances. There, in his words, we encounter him as a guide who knows the fulfillment of silence and how, in that silence, one can hear the mellifluous voice of wilderness, where the voice of the self comes alive spiritually.

Placing the reader in this poetic and ethical space is the first step toward direct action that affects the larger human community: a step toward activism. Activism formalizes the values that inspire and ultimately direct our will—and action—to preserve and protect. The values are gratitude, respect, and generosity. By opening new worlds, other spaces, and creating experiences for the reader—and, crucially, letting the reader explore those worlds for herself or for himself—the lyric writer has an opportunity to create a protected zone for significant communication. We are creatures of language.

I offer here a recent (unpublished) poem that speaks to the relationship between people and nature in uncertain times, and perhaps to the sense of sustenance that nature offers even in places where there is so little of it:

 Morning in the gardenI

Today’s sky glows in the distance

like a child waking up from restful sleep,

the snow on tree crowns has a rosy hue.

Now the sun is changing ink as I walk

from room to room, looking

through curtains; the bright light

of day turns the shoveled road to silver,

making mountains out of mounds.

Overnight, the snow on the cherry tree

grew into round petals, opaline almost.

II

A cardinal, blood red, royal,

sings at the very top of the pitch pine,

the melody unfurls in the pure air,

reaches to the roofs of houses

warm under the snow, down

to the opened window, where I stand

to receive his ancient, thrilling language

that sounds me through and through.

The cardinal’s song is now a river,

the ice film on the maple trees glistens.

III

This winter the snow in the garden

rises like soft bread dough.

Out there in the city a cellist plays

her instrument in a shop window,

a violinist tunes her violin in another;

ambulances wail, life seeps out past

canisters of air, adrenaline injected in the heart,

the intravenous needles meant to rescue

that one final breath. How does the world go on,

how will it live past this gruesome year

of death that stamped its syllable on us,

who receive the music through thick glass?

 

8 February 2021, written on the one-year anniversary of the first deaths from Covid.

All quotations in this blog post come from Olson’s The Singing Wilderness, illustrated by Francis Lee Jaques (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997/ first ed. Knopf, 1956).

Featured image by Gary Bendig on Unsplash 

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A complex networks approach to ranking professional Snooker players

One does not have to look far to observe the innate desire us humans have to rank things. Each year we are faced with endless awards ceremonies—just think about the Oscars, Grammys, Ballon d’Or, Time Person of the Year… the list goes on and on. Indeed, at the turn of every year/decade/century media organizations fill whitespace with their “top 100 (insert domain of interest here) of (insert temporal period here)” where a supposed expert gives their thoughts on the optimal ordering of entities from the domain of choice. These rankings are, however, far from definitive, and rather than settle an argument they instead tend to simply add fuel to the fire of the debate. The main problem with these approaches is that the rankings tend to be based upon personal preference with an extremely high level of subjectivity (the player who scored the goal that won their team the cup, the movie they saw on their first date…). In an ideal science-based world, however, any ranking would be determined using an entirely objective approach which, unfortunately, requires detailed data describing the interactions between different entities to determine who/what exactly is the best.

While the collection of such data can prove difficult for most domains, one area in which there is no shortage of detailed historical data of competition is within the field of sport. Rather, there is in fact a data revolution taking place in sport whereby athletes are becoming increasingly aware of statistics and, moreover, devoted fans of said sports have amassed huge collections of historical results that readily allow for>Figure 1 (a) Probability distribution of the number of matches (blue), wins (pink), and losses (green) for each professional Snooker player. Each point shows the fraction of players that had a certain number of each quantity. Note the scale of both axes are logarithmic suggesting that most players appear in very few matches while a select few appear much more often. (b) Corresponding plot but now showing the probability of having more than a certain number of matches for each player.

Figure 1 shows the corresponding probability distributions describing the number of matches, wins, and losses for each player, which appears to be highly skewed, suggesting a form of “Matthew effect” occurring in the sport in that a select few players win many games while many players win very few. Using this networked representation, an algorithm was proposed which could be used in identifying a ranking of the most important players. In particular, this algorithm considers not only how many times one player defeated another but also how frequently the defeated player themselves defeated others. In this sense each player has some associated prestige describing their quality, and in defeating a player the winner receives some of this associated prestige. This implies that a win against a strong competitor with high prestige is now more worthwhile to a player’s rank than defeating a weaker competitor.

Figure 2 Rankings of the top 30 Snooker players of all time based upon the level of prestige determined via the proposed algorithm (vertical axis) compared to their ranking based upon total wins (horizontal axis). The red line acts as a reference for those players who were ranked higher by prestige than wins (under the line) and vice-versa (above the line).

Using the approach described above, after constructing a network based upon all recorded professional snooker games, it can quickly be determined who is the greatest player of all time. Interestingly, it is not Ronnie O’Sullivan with his natural talent, Steve Davis and his distinguished trophy room, or the winning machine known as Stephen Hendry, but rather the four-time world champion John Higgins! This result may seem surprising to some snooker fans but when the data is considered it is entirely understandable. While both Davis and Hendry have plenty of trophies and wins to their name, the quality of player competing in their era was considerably less than those faced by Higgins and O’Sullivan (who is ranked the second greatest through our approach).

Moreover, this approach can give an indication as to which players have faced tougher competition in wins during their careers. This is highlighted in Figure 2 where the top 30 players ranked using the prestige approach (our algorithm) is compared to their ranking based upon the number of wins. While the two ranking schemes are clearly very correlated, a considerable amount of information may be obtained from the location of players within this graphic. Those players who are above the red line (Davis, Hendry, White…) have obtained their wins from less competitive games (i.e., their wins were accumulated against players with less prestige), while the contrary is true for those below the line, many of whom are from the modern era.

In order to help satisfy the intrinsic human desire to rank entities, this work has proposed a method which utilizes a mathematical framework to determine a ranking of competitors which considers not only the number of times a player has won but also the quality associated with each win. Excitingly, this concept offers plenty of room for extension to any domain for which detailed data on interactions is available and can hopefully help in ending the many arguments about the greatest competitor in your favourite area of interest!

Feature image by Rigo Erives

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Five things you need to know about pronouns

What is there to know about pronouns? Something about its and it’s and something else about between you and me.

There is plenty more, it turns out.

First off, there are more pronouns than you might think. Personal pronouns get most of the attention nowadays, especially the widely accepted singular they and other non-binary pronouns. But personal pronouns are just one group among several. There are reflexive (or self) forms, indefinite pronouns like everyone, anyone, and someone (or the more informal everybody, anybody, and somebody), demonstrative pronouns like this and that and these and those, and even interrogative pronouns like who and its stuffy sibling whom, to name just a few.

A second thing to know is that pronouns are not always single words. Some of them are, and in some cases they are so weightless that it’s hard to have them at the end of a sentence. (Try saying Give me it or Where’s it?) But other pronouns are compound, like the reciprocal pronouns each other and one another, the emphatic reflexives I myself, you yourself, they themselves, and so on. There are even idiomatic compounds like Everybody and their dog, which just means everybody, and dismissive compounds like your ass, which just means you in sentences like “If you keep that up, they’re going to fire your ass.”

Third is the fact that pronouns are always changing. The Old English third person pronouns were hē, hēo, hit, and hīe. Over time, hēo was replaced by she, a borrowing from Scandinavian according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Hīe was replaced by they. And hit lost its h to become it. Later still, second person you and thou shifted from just distinguishing singular versus plural to indicating social distance: formal versus informal, like French tous and vous. And still later the thou forms were lost and the you pronouns became both singular and plural. The same thing is happening today with they, which is well on its way to being a standard singular form.

A fourth thing is that pronouns reveal our motives and emotions. Are we focused on ourselves or others? Is it me, me, me or us? Social psychologist James Pennebaker has done large-scale computer analysis of pronouns in blogs, love letters, plays, and presidential speeches, showing how the percentages of “I” and “we” offer insight into everything from how people respond to tragedies to whether lovers will break up.

Fifth and finally, pronouns are surprisingly hard for children to learn. Imagine you are an infant listening in on a conversation between two adults. They refer to themselves as “I” and “me” and to the other as “you.”  Pronouns have variable rather than stable reference and it takes time for infants to learn the nuances. That’s why parents might refer to themselves as “Mommy” or “Daddy.”

Pronouns are shifty—but they are also fascinating.

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Fake news is not new: Russia’s 19th-century disinformation experiment

Russian “information warfare”—from hacking to efforts to sow “fake news” abroad—has captured international headlines in recent years. Although Russian efforts to influence western opinion are usually seen as a product of the Cold War, they have a much longer lineage.

In the late nineteenth century, liberal citizens in England, France, and Switzerland regarded the Russian autocracy with horror. Consequently, they welcomed refugees from Russia with open arms, granting them extensive asylum rights regardless of the reason they had fled their homeland. Tsarist officials expressed extreme frustration that hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries and Jewish laborers had illegally emigrated from Russia and found refuge in Europe. They insisted that far from virtuous refugees, these migrants were criminals and malefactors who would sow unrest in Europe. Given the widespread sympathy that Russian émigrés had found in Europe, however, these complaints fell on deaf ears.

The first efforts to change European opinions about Russian refugees were ad hoc in nature, devised by a few self-appointed defenders of the tsarist regime. In London, Olga Novikova hosted a salon at Claridge’s hotel and published regular articles in the British press justifying Russia’s imperial mission, autocratic government, and even its brutal treatment of its Jews. In Paris, Russian nobles and French patriots associated with the salon of Juliette Adam insisted that Russia and France should overcome their political differences and combat German aggression together. This circle, which advocated its views to a broader public in Adam’s journal La Nouvelle Revue, appears to have informally cooperated with Novikova, a personal friend of Adam’s, and her group.

The first intersection between the tsarist state and these informal Russophile circles active in Europe came in the mid-1880s, when Petr Rachkovskii arrived in Paris to serve as chief of the tsarist secret police abroad. Having worked as a journalist in Russia before he joined the police, Rachkovskii was among the first tsarist officials to acknowledge and embrace the power of public opinion. A habitué of Adam’s salon, he worked to systematize its outreach efforts, founding a press agency of his own. It agents bribed the editors of prominent European newspapers to produce coverage that was friendly toward the tsarist regime and secured positions at outlets such as Le Figaro, where they produced their own pro-Russian content. The agency also produced some half-dozen books and even a work of fiction aimed at western audiences.

In working to smear the reputation of émigrés and to improve perceptions of the tsarist regime, Rachkovskii’s publicists cannily drew on anxieties that already begun to emerge from European society. Catering to emergent circles of antisemites, they portrayed the refugees (both Jews and non-Jews) as parties to a Jewish plot to destroy Europe’s cultural and political values. Pro-tsarist publicists also exploited the growing anxieties about the shortcomings of liberal regimes. Remarking on the corruption and economic inequality that plagued western democracy, they insisted that the authoritarian style of the Russian autocracy was a laudable alternative.

By the late 1880s, the effects of Russian outreach efforts were already visible on the European right. Texts of Russian provenance circulated widely among French antisemites; nativist activists in England cited work produced by Russian publicists as evidence that émigrés posed a threat to the nation’s economy and its values. In 1890, Rachkovskii made his most audacious move yet. One of his agents infiltrated a circle of émigrés in Paris, incited them to build bombs, and even supplied them with materials. Rachkovskii then alerted the French police, who swooped in and arrested the entire circle. The episode, covered widely by the press across the continent, instigated a panic about Russian émigrés, bringing many of the ideas once promoted by pro-tsarist publicists into the mainstream. Meanwhile, it improved relations between Russia and the liberal powers, convincing politicians once hesitant to cooperate with their Russian counterparts that the tsarist regime was a potential partner in an emergent global war against terror. Over the course of the next decade, Russian émigrés faced unprecedented harassment in the form of police surveillance, extradition, and expulsion. In England, the critics of open borders who had drawn inspiration from Russian publicists succeeded in passing the Aliens Act, which limited the immigration of eastern European Jews.

The story of Russia’s nineteenth-century campaign to shape European public opinion reveals how effective information warfare can be. Over the course of just a few decades, Russian publicists succeeded in transforming European discourse about émigrés and the tsarist regime. However, the Russian campaign succeeded mostly because it built on pre-existing anxieties about terrorism and the effects of emigration and exploited evident weaknesses in liberal regimes. This lesson also applies to today’s context, in which Russian propagandists again exploit racial tensions, xenophobia, and mistrust of government for their own purposes. The best defense against information warfare is not found in the realm of international relations; instead, it begins with addressing our problems at home.

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Do we need artificial inventors?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has started to unleash a new industrial revolution. It represents a significant technology advantage which already impacts today’s products and services and will drive tomorrow’s industries. Its key importance to the technological progress of future societies is beyond doubt and is reflected by a boom in patent applications on AI technology since 2013 in various industry sectors.

From a legal perspective, the patent system is the core mechanism to foster innovation. The prospect of a patent is supposed to induce innovative behaviour. However, the founders of intellectual property (IP) law never considered that a machine could one day autonomously come up with a new, useful, and non-obvious idea. Historically, the patent system has been built on a paradigm of human inventorship.

Just recently, various courts and patent offices confirmed that a machine cannot be the inventor of a patentable invention. The decisions concerned a machine called DABUS. Allegedly, this AI system had autonomously generated two inventions: an innovative food container as well as useful devices and methods for attracting enhanced attention. The patent offices refused the patent applications on formal grounds since only a human can be designated as inventor by the applicant.

The legal status quo has been subject of intensive and controversial discussions. In its DABUS decision, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) criticized that AI systems are currently “shoehorned arbitrarily into existing legislation.” Moreover, in its resolution on intellectual property rights for the development of AI technologies, the European Parliament takes the view that “technical creations generated by AI technology must be protected under the IPR legal framework in order to encourage investment.”

“many authors and institutions assume that accepting AI as a potential inventor necessarily leads to conferring legal capacity on AI”

Many experts are reluctant to recognize AI systems as inventors and contest the capacity of AI systems to invent. From the legal side, they share the view that the patent system is supposed to reward humans for inventive endeavours. Hence, the acknowledgment of artificial inventors would change the foundations of the current system. Moreover, many authors and institutions assume that accepting AI as a potential inventor necessarily leads to conferring legal capacity on AI. This would be a major step interfering with general concepts of civil law in most jurisdictions. In order to protect the claimed-subject matter, a majority of practitioners and scholars advance the idea of simply designating as inventor the user of the AI system which generated the invention. Certainly, the main advantage of this pragmatic approach is that it would circumvent the need to amend the existing patents laws.

However, such an approach entails improper consequences: by being designated as inventor, the user of the AI system would be automatically entitled to moral inventor rights, although he or she might not have been involved in the core inventive process at all. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, the designated inventor is entitled to claim compensation from his or her employer if the AI system was used in the course of employment. Such a payment would be bizarre and unfair, particularly in situations where the employer financed and owns the AI system which the employee operated.

If one looks at things objectively, some of the fears associated with artificial inventors turn out to be unjustified. Allowing for the designation of AI systems as inventor will not change the foundations of the patent system. Already today, patents are not just a reward for inventive endeavours by human geniuses but an instrument to incentivize investments of big enterprises in the creation of innovation. Protecting inventions produced by AI activity will naturally lead to an increase of investments in AI technologies to generate such inventions.

Moreover, acknowledging artificial inventors will not force the legal system to confer legal capacity to AI systems: legally, although the subject matter was invented by AI, nothing prevents the patent from being owned by the user of the AI system, the same way as patent systems currently distinguish between the notion of inventor and the notion of applicant, who is granted the patent right. Very often, the latter is the employer of the inventor and has the right to the patent therefore.

“Allowing for the designation of AI systems as inventor will not change the foundations of the patent system.”

Hence, the IP community is well advised to continue the current discussions on non-human inventorship but also to raise it to a more concrete level. Merely contesting the technological capacity of current AI systems will not solve this issue. Even if the autonomous capacity remains doubtful in the majority of cases, the enhanced capabilities of AI systems will become more and more relevant in the near future.

Nevertheless, one should not argue blindfolded for the acknowledgment of artificial inventorship either. The discussion will need to take into account various rather specific drawbacks. For example, the assessment of inventorship will become more and more complex if the legal systems allow for machine inventorship, in particular if humans and AI systems co-contributed to the inventive process. Courts will need to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the AI system or the user of the machine is the inventor or whether both have to be understood as joint inventors. Another challenge to be tackled will be the inventive step (or non-obviousness) assessment. The starting point of this test in the current system is the state of the art. A patent office has to assess that the claimed invention is not obvious to a person skilled in the art in order to grant a patent. If AI systems are potential inventors, patent offices will need to take into account the knowledge and capacity of such systems in their analysis. This assessment will be more complex than determining the knowledge of a (human) person skilled in the art and will most likely require patent offices themselves to employ AI when examining those applications.

So, do we need to recognise AI inventorship? As one can see, it is not possible at the moment to answer this question with a simple yes or no. The question requires a thorough analysis and debate involving all stakeholders in the IP community (patent offices, legal practitioners, national legislators, and academia). It will need to be conducted in an open and unbiased way. The future creation of an observatory at the European Patent Office (EPO), which will bring together public and private stakeholders to discuss and debate developments in innovation and patents could serve in the future as an appropriate forum. Currently, the recent creation of an AI Task Force by the five largest patent offices in the world (EPO, Japan Patent Office (JPO), Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA), and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), known as “IP5”) shows that patent offices have started realizing the importance of engaging in the debate.

The post Do we need artificial inventors? appeared first on OUPblog.

Do we need artificial investors?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has started to unleash a new industrial revolution. It represents a significant technology advantage which already impacts today’s products and services and will drive tomorrow’s industries. Its key importance to the technological progress of future societies is beyond doubt and is reflected by a boom in patent applications on AI technology since 2013 in various industry sectors.

From a legal perspective, the patent system is the core mechanism to foster innovation. The prospect of a patent is supposed to induce innovative behaviour. However, the founders of intellectual property (IP) law never considered that a machine could one day autonomously come up with a new, useful, and non-obvious idea. Historically, the patent system has been built on a paradigm of human inventorship.

Just recently, various courts and patent offices confirmed that a machine cannot be the inventor of a patentable invention. The decisions concerned a machine called DABUS. Allegedly, this AI system had autonomously generated two inventions: an innovative food container as well as useful devices and methods for attracting enhanced attention. The patent offices refused the patent applications on formal grounds since only a human can be designated as inventor by the applicant.

The legal status quo has been subject of intensive and controversial discussions. In its DABUS decision, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) criticized that AI systems are currently “shoehorned arbitrarily into existing legislation.” Moreover, in its resolution on intellectual property rights for the development of AI technologies, the European Parliament takes the view that “technical creations generated by AI technology must be protected under the IPR legal framework in order to encourage investment.”

“many authors and institutions assume that accepting AI as a potential inventor necessarily leads to conferring legal capacity on AI”

Many experts are reluctant to recognize AI systems as inventors and contest the capacity of AI systems to invent. From the legal side, they share the view that the patent system is supposed to reward humans for inventive endeavours. Hence, the acknowledgment of artificial inventors would change the foundations of the current system. Moreover, many authors and institutions assume that accepting AI as a potential inventor necessarily leads to conferring legal capacity on AI. This would be a major step interfering with general concepts of civil law in most jurisdictions. In order to protect the claimed-subject matter, a majority of practitioners and scholars advance the idea of simply designating as inventor the user of the AI system which generated the invention. Certainly, the main advantage of this pragmatic approach is that it would circumvent the need to amend the existing patents laws.

However, such an approach entails improper consequences: by being designated as inventor, the user of the AI system would be automatically entitled to moral inventor rights, although he or she might not have been involved in the core inventive process at all. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, the designated inventor is entitled to claim compensation from his or her employer if the AI system was used in the course of employment. Such a payment would be bizarre and unfair, particularly in situations where the employer financed and owns the AI system which the employee operated.

If one looks at things objectively, some of the fears associated with artificial inventors turn out to be unjustified. Allowing for the designation of AI systems as inventor will not change the foundations of the patent system. Already today, patents are not just a reward for inventive endeavours by human geniuses but an instrument to incentivize investments of big enterprises in the creation of innovation. Protecting inventions produced by AI activity will naturally lead to an increase of investments in AI technologies to generate such inventions.

Moreover, acknowledging artificial inventors will not force the legal system to confer legal capacity to AI systems: legally, although the subject matter was invented by AI, nothing prevents the patent from being owned by the user of the AI system, the same way as patent systems currently distinguish between the notion of inventor and the notion of applicant, who is granted the patent right. Very often, the latter is the employer of the inventor and has the right to the patent therefore.

“Allowing for the designation of AI systems as inventor will not change the foundations of the patent system.”

Hence, the IP community is well advised to continue the current discussions on non-human inventorship but also to raise it to a more concrete level. Merely contesting the technological capacity of current AI systems will not solve this issue. Even if the autonomous capacity remains doubtful in the majority of cases, the enhanced capabilities of AI systems will become more and more relevant in the near future.

Nevertheless, one should not argue blindfolded for the acknowledgment of artificial inventorship either. The discussion will need to take into account various rather specific drawbacks. For example, the assessment of inventorship will become more and more complex if the legal systems allow for machine inventorship, in particular if humans and AI systems co-contributed to the inventive process. Courts will need to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the AI system or the user of the machine is the inventor or whether both have to be understood as joint inventors. Another challenge to be tackled will be the inventive step (or non-obviousness) assessment. The starting point of this test in the current system is the state of the art. A patent office has to assess that the claimed invention is not obvious to a person skilled in the art in order to grant a patent. If AI systems are potential inventors, patent offices will need to take into account the knowledge and capacity of such systems in their analysis. This assessment will be more complex than determining the knowledge of a (human) person skilled in the art and will most likely require patent offices themselves to employ AI when examining those applications.

So, do we need to recognise AI inventorship? As one can see, it is not possible at the moment to answer this question with a simple yes or no. The question requires a thorough analysis and debate involving all stakeholders in the IP community (patent offices, legal practitioners, national legislators, and academia). It will need to be conducted in an open and unbiased way. The future creation of an observatory at the European Patent Office (EPO), which will bring together public and private stakeholders to discuss and debate developments in innovation and patents could serve in the future as an appropriate forum. Currently, the recent creation of an AI Task Force by the five largest patent offices in the world (EPO, Japan Patent Office (JPO), Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA), and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), known as “IP5”) shows that patent offices have started realizing the importance of engaging in the debate.

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Was Spinoza a populist? [Long read]

Recent studies of Spinoza’s political theory in a contemporary perspective often place it in one of two categories, depicting him either as a defender of individual free speech and liberal democracy or as a champion of radical democracy and collective popular power. For some, he is something like a liberal supporter of the equal individual rights of all citizens to express whatever is on their mind, an early defender of “free speech.” For others, he is more like a left-wing populist championing the power of the multitude against a state taken hostage by special interests. Either way, Spinoza is seen to give theoretical support to popular resistance to excessive state power. Either way, he potentially or actually provides fodder for populist positions, no matter whether the culpable elite is construed as an entrenched state apparatus surreptitiously seeking to curb individual freedoms (a so-called “deep state”) or as representatives of global corporate interests embedded within the structures of government (as in Negri and Hardt’s conception of “Empire.”)

Much politically potent commentary has been produced on both sides of this divide. It all attempts—implicitly or explicitly—to enroll the philosopher in the service of whatever political project the authors wish to promote. Yet I think we will learn more from Spinoza if we let him address his own historical circumstances before asking him of what use his political theory may be to us in ours. And the fact is that neither US-style liberalism or libertarianism nor radical democracy was on the political menu anywhere in late seventeenth-century Europe when Spinoza wrote his texts. Moreover, nothing in his immediate political circumstances suggests that he would think that state power represented the principal threat to the freedom of citizens or the civil laws to be restrictions put on that freedom. Indeed, it is the contrary: those circumstances would rather make us expect him to defend state power as means to secure the freedom of citizens, and the civil laws to be the political instrument for achieving that. And this, indeed, he did.

Spinoza in the Dutch Republic

“we will learn more from Spinoza if we let him address his own historical circumstances before asking him of what use his political theory may be to us in ours”

When Spinoza published his Tractatus theologico-politicus anonymously in 1670 in order to “defend the freedom of philosophizing,” he was promoting a certain kind of citizen. As others among Dutch Republican thinkers of his generation, perhaps most importantly the brothers Johann and Pieter de la Court, he was seeking to highlight the potential of a new political class that emerged in his time and to which many of Spinoza’s closest friends belonged: a financially independent, well-educated, and increasingly secular urban population eager to have their word in governance—the “wise merchants” as Caspar Barlaeus called them in his famous inaugural lecture as rector of the Amsterdam Athanaeum in 1632. These were, as Spinoza puts it, the “best citizens” whom “a good education, integrity of character, and virtue have made more free.” He put much confidence in them to lead a great democratic reform of the political structures of counsel and command, of political consultation, participation, and decision-making in the Dutch Republic. And his book—which in many ways can be read like an extended political pamphlet—aimed at showing the societal benefits of not just permitting, but actively supporting the creation and consolidation of a public sphere where this new breed of citizens could participate in political deliberations, a public sphere of “free philosophizing” where private men could come together to exchange in public about matters of common interest.

We will not succeed in understanding the meaning of Spinoza’s political theory if we do not take into account the fact that he was responding to circumstances tied to these transformations in the political landscape of the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. This said, while elaborating his response, he also created a political theory of democratic governance, republican ideals, society and religion, civic education, and popular participation in politics that, mutatis mutandis, also speaks to a wide range of today’s political issues, including—to mention just a few—free speech, political lying and deception, political flattery and opportunism, cultural and religious prejudice in public discourse, and the fundamental mechanisms of democratic deliberation and majority rule. And among these present-day issues that Spinoza’s texts can help address, we also find that of populism, if we understand by that a kind of politics that seeks to cater for the interests of a perceived class of ordinary people, by opposition to economic, political, and/or intellectual elites.

Now, in Spinoza’s time, the principal political fault line opposed the defenders of the prerogatives of the Spanish Crown in the Netherlands (the so-called Orangists) to those who defended the republican freedom of the Netherlands and the so-called “True Freedom” ushered in by Johan de Witt’s rule in the 1650s and 1660s. The idea of catering for the broader population was associated with the Orangist side of the political equation, with the Calvinist Church, and with the less educated rural population, as opposed to the badly disguised oligarchy of De Witt’s secular republican regime, organized around the state regents and their privileges and supported by the more urban segment of the population. Within that historical framework, it is remarkable that a defender of Dutch republicanism should also champion broad democratic participation in the way Spinoza did. But it also invites us to exercise considerable caution before we simply merge Spinoza’s republican ideals and democratic aspirations, because Dutch republicanism remained on the whole wedded to the idea that participation in political deliberation and decision-making was conditioned on political competence. Just being a citizen alone was not quite enough to qualify to participate in public deliberations. In Spinoza’s favored democracy, we learn in the 1677 Tractatus politicus, only a person “who is bound only by the laws … and who is … his own master and lives honorably, has the right to vote in the supreme council and to stand for political offices.” The requirement to be one’s own master, or sui juris, here prompts Spinoza’s infamous exclusion of women from voting rights and political office, but the demonstrable awfulness—on every level, logical, rhetorical, and ethical—of the argument he develops to that particular effect has tended to overshadow the broader, systemic meaning of the requirement of self-mastery for citizens of a democratic republic.

What is political freedom?

“Spinoza believed a democratic state form becomes dysfunctional… if it does not include adjacent structures of free public consultation… that are sufficiently robust and protected by the state to withstand the threats from ill-intended or violent citizens”

In any case, all this casts considerable doubt on any notion that Spinoza’s program for democratic reform was most importantly motivated by a concern for either popular sovereignty or individual freedom. It was governed by a republican concern for collective political freedom, peace and security. Spinoza did indeed argue—as one of the first in modern political theory—that a democratic state form offered the best path to achieve such collective political freedom. But he held this to be true only under certain conditions.

First, Spinoza believed, a democratic state form becomes dysfunctional and degenerates into mob rule if it does not include adjacent structures of free public consultation—a broad public sphere—that are sufficiently robust and protected by the state to withstand the threats from ill-intended or violent citizens, from those “worst men” who “censure publicly those who disagree” and “persecute in a hostile spirit.” This is a key insight for Spinoza and I think an important one for us, too. In order to secure a public sphere in which all citizens can participate with equal right and without fear the most important thing is not, as contemporary free speech advocates would have it, to defend the public sphere against state intrusion. It is to protect, by means of state institutions and legal safeguards, the public sphere from violence perpetrated by other citizens. Spinoza’s call for state control over the church is the most striking consequence of that approach—one that has been declared paradoxical by liberalist readers of Spinoza but which is in fact a direct consequence of one most basic feature of his understanding of political freedom, namely, that it first of all consists in state-guaranteed freedom from violence, so that we can express our judgments freely in the public sphere without fear of being persecuted by others. Securing such political freedom therefore requires appropriate state regulation of public speech, not de-regulation!

Second, in order to ascertain that democratic participation does not fall into disrepair and the public sphere eventually collapses into a chaotic mix of prejudice, deception, and flattery, citizens must have received a practical education to help ensure their financial independence, a liberal education which has taught them how to judge for themselves rather than simply spewing prejudices, and a civic education which has taught them to abide by basic rules of non-violence and respect for the social contract.

Spinoza’s democratic republicanism

So what kind of democrat was Spinoza? Well, one thing he certainly was not was a defender of “free speech” as that expression is understood today. Was he anything like a left populist, then? Making of him, as is sometimes done, a partisan of popular power for the sole reason that he claims that political power ultimately lies with the people is hardly enough to put him in that basket. It is merely standard republican fare given that he does not claim that public authority—and I am referring here to the proper notion of authoritas, not the intractable term imperium—necessarily also lies with the people. And this he does not. In Spinoza, power lies with the people but public authority with the sovereign exactly as in Cicero power belongs to the people but authority to the senate. He was perhaps a populist in the sense that he rejected government based on the old courtly structures of privy counselors—special political advisors that he saw as either too self-interested or not sufficiently independent from the sovereigns they served. Remarkably for his time, he favored a broad interface of public consultation between the general citizenry and the sovereign power. He did, however, also think that broad public consultation would only be beneficial if citizens were sufficiently independent, knowledgeable, and committed to the common republican project to be worthwhile consulting. Practical, liberal, and civic education of citizens should go hand in hand with the political construction of a democratic republic. By contrast, he did not think that participatory democracy was necessarily advantageous for what he called “wretched” peoples subjected to their own prejudices and willing to “fight for slavery as they would for their salvation.” Spinoza’s extended analyses of the ancient Hebrew Republic show exactly this. But we could wonder if the events at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 do not show it too.

Featured image by Aquiles Carattino via  Unsplash

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