Oxford University Press's Blog, page 138

What we can learn from ancient Greeks about tyranny

In their brand-new democracy, the people of ancient Athens knew there was one form of government they never wanted to suffer through again: tyranny. They loved to see plays depicting tyrants on stage. These rulers typically do not listen to advice or expert opinion. But authority figures who don’t listen don’t learn; they make terrible mistakes and drag others down with them. One reason they don’t listen is that they think they know everything better than anyone else. That’s hubris, overweening pride—a trait no leader should exhibit. Another reason they don’t listen is that they hear advice from subordinates as a challenge to their authority. They are afraid of being overthrown, and so they construe unwelcome news as part of a conspiracy to destroy them. These tyrant traits are a kind of cognitive disability.

This is as true today as it was 2500 years ago. When I ask my students—who range from 18-year-olds to middle aged mid-career executives—to write about bad times they have had with authority figures, at least two-thirds of them write about people who would not listen. They might write about a boss or a coach or a band director or even a parent, but the pain is the same: If these people would only listen to us, we might improve the product, or start winning games, or whatever. But they don’t listen, so we quit, or tune out, or go into passive resistance. And they make terrible mistakes, of which the most painful is punishing people unjustly.

Ancient Greek plays illustrate these themes brilliantly. Originally the word tyrannos simply meant “ruler,” but by the time Sophocles was writing it referred to the kind of one-man rule Athens had known before its turn to democracy—two generations of a dynasty that did not feel bound to observe the law. These rulers had begun as populists, but their rule ended after a scandal involving sexual abuse—the younger of two tyrant brothers tried to use his power to force a boy to have sex with him. The boy and his lover assassinated the tyrant and were themselves killed. The older tyrant brother lived on and ruled a few more years but was put down with help from Sparta.

One of the most striking theater cases is that of Oedipus, who is depicted as having tyrant qualities in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannus. There we see that Oedipus has done well by the city of Thebes; he is proud of his intelligence, and he loves to tell people what a genius he is. Now the city faces a new crisis—a plague. In those days, people believed that plagues were the result of violations of religious rules. In this case, an oracle has told them the cause is the presence of a killer in their land. The oracle says that the plague will continue until this killer is discovered and exiled. Oedipus guarantees that he will find the truth, end the plague, and save the city. He is hampered in his quest, however, by his tyrant qualities. If he were a better listener, he would learn quickly that he has been the problem all along, but instead he responds to what he is told with murderous rage, and so he draws out the investigation to great length (about a thousand lines of text). That is what makes this a great play. No other version of the story made Oedipus a tyrant or drew out the inquiry to such an extent, drawing put the pleasure its audience takes in knowing something the lead character does not.

At the end of his life, about thirty years after writing this play, Sophocles wrote a second play about Oedipus. In this one, Oedipus is saved and comforted by a leader who does know how to listen—Theseus. Oedipus is a refugee on the outskirts of Athens, at Colonus. He is blind and crippled, old, haggard, and no doubt filthy from years of homelessness. He is suspected of carrying a curse with him. When a crowd of citizen is about to turn violent and drive Oedipus away, Theseus arrives and listens to his story. Theseus shows compassion for the old wanderer and teaches the crowd to welcome him. In return, Theseus receives a blessing for the whole city. The playwright, now in his eighties, has closed the circle of his work with a depiction of a genuine leader—one who listens, acts with compassion, and brings benefits to all.

This is what we should want at all levels as we decide who should lead us in the future. Can we identify people who can listen and learn, who do not always think they know best? Can we find people who will cast aside suspicions of conspiracy and act without fear for themselves, but for the benefit of all? I hope so.

Photo by Levi Clancy on Unsplash.

The post What we can learn from ancient Greeks about tyranny appeared first on OUPblog.

The technocratic politics of the American right

Conservatives today often present themselves as populists running against a left said to be out of touch with the common people and enamored of technocratic rule by experts. This is, in fact, a longstanding critique found not only in grassroots ideological discourse but also in the work of conservative philosophers like Michael Oakeshott, who suggested that the left was entangled in an overbearing rationalism that led to forms of social engineering and political manipulation.

However, both the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of antiliberal thought on the right have made evident that technocracy is by no means limited to a single side of the political spectrum. To the contrary, the American right also nurtures unique strains of technocratic politics that have played an enormous role in contemporary life.

Consider first how many Americans have rejected social distancing measures by relying on the premise that the economy demands not only markets remain open but also that government assistance be kept to a minimum. The latter was, for example, the line of argument voiced by Donald Trump’s chief trade advisor Peter Navarro, an academic economist, who proclaimed that the basics of economic science required reopening markets and pushing wage workers (in America disproportionately comprised of racial minorities and immigrants) back into spaces where they risk contracting the virus.

This economic rationale is a popularization of the complex theories of the neoclassical paradigm which helped fuel a massive restructuring of the global economy over the last half century. Neoclassical economics not only made a claim to an expert science of the mechanics of wealth but also suggested a vision of human agency as essentially calculative and self-interested. In popularized form, this purported science was summarized in various folk adages and sentiments like “government is never the solution” and “it’s the economy, stupid.”

One reason the United States currently finds itself so uniquely unable to effectively combat the virus through national contact tracing, effective testing, and greater healthcare coverage is because many Americans believe an expert science of economics has established that “big government” is always to be avoided. This has meant measures proven to be effective against the pandemic in other countries go unemployed or haphazardly implemented. Ironically, a technocratic “science” of economy ensures that public health experts are treated skeptically even as the United States suffers an astonishing rate of preventable infection and death.

But rightwing technocracy is also evident in a very different form amid the antiliberal right that came to electoral power in 2016. This is particularly clear in the wave of antiliberal intellectuals—like Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen and Harvard legal theorist Adrian Vermeule—who present themselves as diagnosticians of liberalism’s impending doom.

For example, Deneen’s surprise bestseller, Why Liberalism Failed, relied on the social scientific claim that liberalism must collapse because it supposedly conforms to a certain predictable and inescapable mechanics of decline. As Deneen expressed it: “liberalism has failed” due to an “inner logic” that “generate[s] pathologies.” Drawing implicitly on the earlier work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Deneen argued that the atomized and ultra-autonomous conception of the individual in liberal ideology must lead to moral decline and societal dissolution.

Although Deneen presents himself as a critic of technocratic politics in favor of localism and populist nationalism, his theory in fact assumes the same basic conception of political knowledge: one where certain experts offer indubitable predictive knowledge about the future. Indeed, ironically Deneen’s form of anti-liberalism assumes the very same discredited and obsolete stadial and developmental conceptions of history associated with thinkers like G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and more recently Francis Fukuyama. But where Fukuyama saw history predictably culminating in liberal ideology, Deneen claims instead to presage liberalism’s demise. Deneen has thus simply turned Fukuyama on his head.

The mistake—made evident by reflection on the insights of hermeneutic or interpretive social science—is to assume that liberal ideology is an essential type with a reductive set of properties. But liberalism (like all ideologies) is a set of meanings and family resemblances and does not have the logic of a predictable, developmental mechanics or necessary, essentialized process. Instead, human creative agency is such that ideological traditions and human history itself is open-ended. Technocracy, whether of the right or left, fails to grasp this central truth.

Featured Image Credit: by Alem Omerovic on Unsplash

The post The technocratic politics of the American right appeared first on OUPblog.

What we can learn from tragedy

June 2020 marked the third anniversary of the Grenfell Tower disaster, when 72 people died as a result of a fire in a block of flats in one of the poorest parts of the richest parts of London. Before and since the fire, in recent years the United Kingdom’s most marginalised and vulnerable communities have endured other disasters, including austerity, the Windrush scandal, and, most recently, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. What do the fire and the pandemic have in common? Lots. We can understand how much when we understand how often people have described both using the language of tragedy (that is, a set of ideas and terms derived from the performance and study of tragic drama).

When I am teaching tragedy, my students often ask where a particular tragedy starts, or what causes it.  We have also discussed how people have used the language of tragedy to expose or conceal the causes of both Grenfell and COVID-19. Shortly after the fire, the Conservative local government minister, Alok Sharma, addressed Parliament to say “This is a tragedy which should never have happened.” From a certain perspective, this is a paradox: tragedy is always going to happen because of a character’s flaws, or fate, or the gods. Oedipus tries not to kill his father and sleep with his mother, but does so all the same, disclosing how tragedy can be seen as “that which is and must be,” as the literary scholar Northrop Frye put it. At that point, though, Sharma didn’t say why the fire was always going to happen. Others did, and have continued to do so.  During the 2019 UK general election, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative MP and then-leader of the Commons, had to apologise for a radio interview where he appeared to blame the dead: it was a “tragedy” that Grenfell victims hadn’t followed “common sense” and ignored advice from the Fire Service. Back in 2017, Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, also used the language of tragedy.  But he had a different target, affirming what Sharma and Rees-Mogg did not, or would not: “The tragedy we’re seeing is because of the consequences of mistakes and neglect from politicians, from the council and from the Government.”

Are people saying similar things now about COVID-19?  Perhaps. One charity has acknowledged that during the pandemic suffering is experienced unequally and should not be: “There can be a strong spoken or unspoken feeling that certain deaths are more tragic than others. But every death can be a tragedy for friends and relatives left behind.”  Inequality – in income, housing, health, education, policing, ways of dying, whatever – is not something that has to exist. People cause it by making specific political, economic, and social choices. Are those with power prepared to make different choices, or will they continue to obscure the effects of the choices they have made?  Invoking tragedy might help them do so, if we are made to assume suffering is inevitable, or due to individuals’ failings.

But Grenfell showed that not everyone uses the language of tragedy this way.  In Spring 2020, then, as the pandemic tightened its grip, headlines appeared like “Tragedy unfolds as virus deaths rise in Europe’s homes for elderly.” These problems caused by how we look after old people for profit made a bad situation worse. Comparably, because of how they were housed, Grenfell’s victims were overwhelmingly poor, black or minority ethnic individuals and families. Now, in the UK, there is ample evidence that black and minority ethnic communities have suffered disproportionate levels of COVID-19-related morbidity and mortality. In this context, saying black lives matter has rarely mattered more.  Ethnicity intersects with class, too. People in low-pay, insecure, high-exposure jobs are more likely to contract and die from COVID-19.   This, in turn, is “a terrible tragedy,” as a union official described the deaths of five London bus workers.  We might add that during the crisis, many people have experienced food shortages, endured isolation, felt unsafe in their homes, suffered from increased stress or domestic abuse, seen employment stop suddenly, or received a subsistence income from the state. This has been described as becoming a new normal. But for many other people this has already long been normal, and this is tragic.

Tragedy involves suffering; it also requires heroes. During the COVID-19 crisis, it has become important to celebrate the efforts of some of the lowest-paid people in society, as heroes amongst us – medical staff, postal workers, bus and delivery drivers, refuse collectors, and carers. Aristocratic tragic heroes, and the stories they inhabit, might seem a world away from these everyday heroes, and from Grenfell.  But the point of such tragic heroes, however flawed, haughty, white, or male, is to propel stories that create “pity and fear” (in Aristotle’s terms).  Such emotions unsettle characters – and audiences – with sympathy. Our current heroes and victims of Grenfell or COVID-19 or any of the inequalities that made them possible or worse do not need or want pity or sympathy.   But they demand and deserve action.

In the words of the great theorist of modern tragedy, Raymond Williams, such action involves “struggle,” even “revolution.” Many people have protested that the world cannot go on as if it is business as usual after lockdown; tragedy can help us anticipate what could or should be different. For as Williams put it, “the action of tragedy” makes us “make…connections” between causes and effects, between myth and reality, between victims and perpetrators. Tragedy, then, can make us see the connections (and the calculated disconnections) that explain why the haves have and the have-nots don’t.

As a “starving mutinous” citizen says of his supposed betters early in William Shakespeare’s great social tragedy, Coriolanus: “what authority surfeits on would relieve us.” When we look at the “rabble” in that play, or the female asylum seekers in Aeschylus’ The Suppliants, or those still campaigning for justice for Grenfell, or Windrush, or George Floyd, we see, finally, how tragedy – as experience and as art – makes connections amongst and beyond those who have been told they have no power because their lives do not matter, precisely because they do.

Featured Image Credit: Fireman looking at fire via  Unsplash

The post What we can learn from tragedy appeared first on OUPblog.

Exploring hypothetical thinking

What is hypothetical thinking? We do it continually. Consider making a decision, from choosing what to eat to choosing what to do about a dangerous disease. In deciding between options, you have to consider each of them, working out what’s likely to happen if  you take it, then compare the results. A natural human way to do that is by imagining taking the given option, and following through that scenario, still “offline” in imagination, but constrained by your background sense of reality. That sense includes innate or learned patterns of expectation about what will happen next, of how things and people in general tend to behave; it also includes your knowledge of your local environment and its particular inhabitants. It may be informed by modern science. Unfortunately, it may also be distorted by various sorts of prejudice and error. Still, we often have to rely on our ability to preview options hypothetically, because we cannot try them all before deciding. Choosing the right option first time can be a matter of life or death.

Hypothetical thinking is used for theoretical purposes as well as practical ones. For example, when a mathematician wants to prove that every number with a property P also has a property Q, the most straightforward way to do it is by supposing that an unspecified number x has P, then proving from that hypothesis that x also has Q. For that shows that if x has P, then x has Q. Since x could be any number with P, the argument establishes that every number with P also has Q.

We can get more precise about what such cases have in common. They all involve a procedure for assessing conditional statements of the form “If X, then Y.” For instance, “X” could be “It rains” and “Y” “The match will be cancelled”, or “X” could be “I try to swim across the river” and “Y” “I’ll reach the other side.” The procedure is this. First, suppose X. Then, on that hypothesis, assess Y, using whatever background information is appropriate. Finally, whatever attitude you take to Y on the hypothesis X, take the same attitude unconditionally to “If X, then Y.” Thus, if you accept the conclusion “I’ll reach the other side” on the hypothesis “I try to swim across the river” (the current is slow, you are a strong swimmer), you unconditionally accept the conditional statement “If I try to swim the river, I’ll reach the other side.” But if you reject the conclusion “I’ll reach the other side” on the hypothesis “I try to swim across the river” (the current is fast, you are a weak swimmer), you unconditionally reject the conditional statement. We may call that procedure the Suppositional Rule. Although its explicit articulation in words is quite abstract, we implicitly use it in practice all the time. It comes so naturally to us that it may seem almost trivial.

What we fail to realize, in unreflectively applying the Suppositional Rule, is that it contains a hidden logical inconsistency. That can be proved in several different ways; Suppose and Tell has the details. Thus it cannot be 100% reliable. But that does not mean that it is completely useless. It works well enough for practical purposes in most ordinary applications. When restricted to acceptance on the basis of mathematical proof, it works perfectly. But the unrestricted rule, which we use in everyday life, subtly generates contradictions in some cases.

The Suppositional Rule is what psychologists call a heuristic, a way of answering questions of some kind which is quick and easy to use, but only imperfectly reliable. For example, when we are asked which personal names in a list are the most common, with no access to statistics, we may use their psychological accessibility as a heuristic, a guide to their frequency. In vision, we may use discontinuities in colour as a guide to the edges of solid objects; camouflage exploits the limitations of that heuristic.

The inconsistency of our heuristic for conditionals helps explain why logicians have had so much trouble understanding the meaning of conditional statements in natural languages. It was already a matter of controversy amongst the ancient Greeks, more than two thousand years ago. The poet Callimachus wrote: “Even the crows on the rooftops are cawing about the question ‘Which conditionals are true?’” It is just as hotly contested today amongst philosophers and linguists. The trouble was that we didn’t realize just what rule we were applying, so its inconsistency was unclear. This affected even the data on which discussion relied, which largely consisted of sample sentences classified as “correct” or “incorrect”—using the inconsistent heuristic!

How can such a logically flawed heuristic serve us so well in practice? As with other paradoxes uncovered by philosophers, in practice we can get a long way by backing off whenever we bump into a paradox, without trying to understand what it is we have stumbled across.

Featured Image Credit: by Thanos Pal via Unsplash

The post Exploring hypothetical thinking appeared first on OUPblog.

“Scram” and its ungainly kin

On April 18, 2012, while discussing the etymology of shrimp, I wrote that I had once looked up the word scrumptious, to find out its origin. Much to my surprise, I read that scrumptious is perhaps sumptuous, with –cr– added for emphasis. On May 2, 2012, I attacked shrew. My romance with shr- ~ scr-words abated, but I never forgot it. Today, I’ll continue those two stories and again look at shr– and scr-. It is unfortunate that so many scr-words are not spelled with skr-, but this is a mere detail, one of the oddities of our erratic spelling, an irritating distraction. (Would a cake taste worse if spelled as kake? Perhaps, because its rather suspicious origin would then come to the fore, but, since, in everyday life, speakers do not think about the etymology of the words they use, kake might be a welcome improvement. However, before Spelling Reform accomplishes its work, we must enjoy what we have. See the post for May 23, 2007: it is all about eating one’s cake and having it.) Now back to scrumptious! The explanation of its origin looked fanciful, but dealing with scr-words shows that the respectable dictionary did not screw me, if, for a change, I may use such an un-genteel verb in a scholarly blog.

To an etymologist, a quick look at English scr-words presents a curious picture. My sources for this post are The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (ODEE) and Robert L. Chapman’s American Slang, along with a few articles from old periodicals. The ODEE devotes a special entry to the initial group scr-, from which we learn that this group may have the following sources: 1) Old Engl. scr-, even though, as a rule, it changed to shr-, as in shred and shroud; 2) Old Norse scr-; 3) Old French escr-, as in screw, but this Old French word is of Germanic origin; it simply returned “home” from France; 4) Middle Low German or Middle Dutch schr-, as in scrub; and 5) an expressive modification of cr– and in scrunch, from crunch. Obviously, it is only the last rubric that will interest us here.

I regularly, one might think with excessive zeal, refer to sound imitation (also known as onomatopoeia) and sound symbolism. To be sure, such references should be used with reserve, because it is silly to explain away difficulties by conjuring up the ghost of extra emphasis, but the more one studies words, the more one realizes how important those factors are. Though it is impermissible to replace serious work by saying “expressive,” it is also silly to disregard the factor that played and plays an outstanding role in word formation.

The etymology of “screech” my be doubtful, but the ecology of the screech owl is known quite well. Photo by Greg Hume, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Why should scr-~ skr- have risen to such prominence? We don’t know or at least are not sure. (Think of scream and screech.) The fact is that it did. Below, I’ll mention the history of a few words. Perhaps the most curious one is scram. This verb was apparently coined in twentieth-century American English, and there is an agreement (only an agreement!) that it emerged as a shortening of scramble, another word of the same type. This is perhaps more probable than referring to a blend of scamble and cramble, both again meaning more or less the same, that is, “make one’s way by clambering.” In the earlier period, one finds scrame “to pull or rake together with the hands,” scram “to search for what can be picked up,” and three synonyms for “snatching at, raking, scraping together,” as indicated in the OED and repeated in Henry C. Wyld’s The Universal Dictionary of the English Language. (The entire sk-group was investigated in a thorough 1936 German dissertation.) Given this embarrassment of riches, it is hard to decide how exactly scram came into being.

The verb made its triumphant way through cartoons and comic strips, the source of many slang words. From cartoons scram “graduated” to headlines. I borrow this information from V. Royce West’s paper in American Speech 12, 1937, 195-202.  West suggested that the use and even the origin of scram should be sought among the gangster elements, with whom the word seems to have been popular. It triumphed easily (the infinitive to scram has been recorded too!), and scram back, down, from, out, and over appeared. It was once even altered into amskray.

In German, one can say schramm ab!  “get lost!”, apparently a close analog, rather than the source of the English verb. Then we find British dialectal scrim “move quickly” and British scrimshank “to shirk one’s work.” Scrimshank is a well-connected noun. We remember scrimmage ~ scrummage (rugby) which once meant “noisy contention, confused struggle” (spelled with sk- for a change, from the earlier scrimish), seemingly related to skirmish, which, despite its spelling, is of Romance origin. Then there is scrimshaw, originally “handicraft practiced by sailors on long voyages” (a kind of boondoggle?) but now recognized mainly as “whalebone with carved or ornamented design.” Next to it in the dictionary stands scrimp “scanty,” a Scottish word, looking like shrimp, with which I began this essay.

Scrimshaw at its best. Image by Daderot. CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.Scrooge, the ultimate sk[r]inflint. Scrooge and the Ghost of Marley by Arthur Rackham, 1915. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Then there is Scottish and Irish scran “food; pieces of meat,” especially often used in the phrase bad scran “bad food” and by transference “bad luck.” Another expressive word? Probably. John Hotten, in a famous slang dictionary (1864), wrote: “Scranning, or out on the scran, is begging for broken victuals; also an Irish malediction of the milder sort.” Against this background, the dialectal word scrannel “lean,” known since the seventeenth century, does not come as a surprise. Its synonyms were skrank and skranky (ignoble but “expressive” epithets). Some scr– words could be sound-imitative. Such is probably (Old) Scratch “devil,” perhaps related to Icelandic skratta “to laugh” (devils were known to make a lot of frightening noise). Scream and screech have been mentioned earlier in this story.

Whenever we look, scr-words denote things petty and undignified. They were doomed to engender one another, and at one time scr– seems to have taken on a life of its own. (Such formations resemble mushrooms, reproducing by spores.) Here are some more slang words of the same type. Verbs synonymous with the F-word are countless in many languages. Among them, American English has scrag and scrog, reminiscent of screw, scroogle and scroogy (the latter a baseball term, probably an individual formation). Scrounge “to acquire illicitly” is a variant of scrunge “steal,” while scrouge “to crowd out” is a variant of scruze. Dickens must have known some of those verbs, for otherwise, he would not have called his character Scrooge. Scrunch is a variant of crunch. Even the origin of scruff and scrub is obscure (both may be borrowed words).

Against this background, one begins to believe that scrumptious is indeed a reinforced variant of sumptuous. It must mean “really sumptuous.” People always ask how our earliest words were coined. This is how, which does not mean that we have a clear picture of the mental processes of our distant ancestors or that scrunch and scrag are ancient (similar coinages turn up again and again), but old words were invented, and emotions must have played an important role in the process.

Feature image credit: public domain via Stockvault.

The post “Scram” and its ungainly kin appeared first on OUPblog.

Smartphones are pacifiers for tough times

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated consumers’ reliance on new technologies in almost all aspects of their lives, from how they shop, to how they work, to how they communicate with colleagues and loved ones. While a number of technologies have played an important role in this transformation—such as the growth of reliance on video conferencing—among the most important has been the smartphone, a technological device possessed by nearly all adults worldwide. While smartphones had already been an increasingly ubiquitous and irreplaceable part of our lives over the past few years, since the start of the pandemic the device has become an even more essential possession for many of us. Indeed, recent industry reports indicate that smartphone use has increased significantly during the pandemic, with US consumers now spending an average of twenty-three additional minutes per day on their device. This increased dependence on our smartphone seemed particularly notable during stay-at-home lockdowns, when functionalities that were once seen as useful—for example, allowing us to stay constantly updated on news, keep in touch with loved ones, and deliver products to our doorstep—were suddenly transformed into lifelines connecting us to the outside world.

What is interesting, however, is that many of these functionalities (e.g., communication capabilities, access to information, delivery services) are available across a number of the devices we’ve had at our disposal during quarantine, such as our laptop or tablet. Why is it, then, that during this crisis many of us have become more attached to our smartphone in particular? This occurred not solely because of what we can do with our phones, but also because of more deeply rooted emotional and psychological associations we have with the device. For many consumers, their smartphone has also acted as a “pacifying technology” or “adult pacifier” that has helped them cope with the immense psychic stress triggered by the pandemic.

Because of a unique combination of properties—a phone’s highly personal nature, haptic qualities, the sense of privacy it often affords, as well as its wide array of functionalities—over time our smartphone comes to provide a reassuring presence for us, allowing it to serve as a pacifying technology that increases our psychological comfort and, in turn, alleviates feelings of stress.

Results across a series of lab and field studies provide support for this thesis. For example, after being placed under stress, participants who were randomly assigned to use their smartphone to engage in a simple task reported a greater sense of relief than those assigned to engage in the same task on their laptop—and even reported greater stress relief than those assigned to engage in the task on an otherwise similar phone belonging to someone else.

A similar pattern of results appears to occur naturally in the real world. For example, consumers who used their smartphone mostly for work (like answering work emails) tended to derive less psychological comfort and, in turn, less stress relief from the device relative to those who used their phone more for personal reasons like chatting with friends and family. Results from another study found that—relative to current smokers—people who recently quit smoking felt greater attachment to their smartphone; moreover, this relationship was most pronounced for people who quit most recently, with the effect weakening the further back in time they quit. That is, consumers who presumably had the greatest need for a source of relief from stress—those who quit smoking most recently—felt the greatest attachment to their smartphone. Taken together, it appears that much like children derive comfort from their pacifier or security blanket, many of us derive similar emotional benefits from engaging with our smartphone.

Over the past few months, much has been made of how new technologies are helping to overcome the pragmatic inconveniences imposed by the pandemic. These technologies—and smartphones in particular—have played a similarly important role in helping people cope with the emotional toll that the pandemic has wreaked on their daily lives. These days, the palliative role that our smartphone can play (when used in moderation)—that of our adult pacifier—feels more valuable than ever.

Image: Created in Canva

The post Smartphones are pacifiers for tough times appeared first on OUPblog.

Five things to know about F. Scott Fitzgerald

Synonymous with the Jazz Age of the American 1920s which his novels did so much to define, F. Scott Fitzgerald hardly needs any introduction. Reading The Great Gatsby in school has become as much a rite of passage as first kisses and the furtive adolescent rebellion of drinking alcohol before coming of age. Much of Fitzgerald’s reputation is linked to Gatsby, his third novel. To limit his career and his achievement only to Gatsby, however, is to miss so much about what defines Fitzgerald as an author.

A century has now passed since his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published, and the centenary celebrations of his literary output that begin this year will continue for the next two decades. To that end, and to reset some of the myths and facts about Fitzgerald’s life and writing, what follows are five observations that may not have previously caught your attention.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was named after a distant cousin on his mother’s side of the family.
Francis Scott Key (1779-1834) was a lawyer and sometime author who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” three weeks after a British attack on Washington during the War of 1812 which led to the burning of the Treasury, the Capitol, and the President’s House. It would be officially adopted as the national anthem of the United States in 1931. Some accounts suggest Fitzgerald played up the family connection, though the fact that Key was a slaveholder has more recently led to the toppling of his statue in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, by Black Lives Matter protestors.This Side of Paradise was a bestselling novel during Fitzgerald’s lifetime.
While The Great Gatsby might be the Fitzgerald novel most people know or have read, it sold relatively poorly in comparison to his debut work. When Paradise was released, it sold out its initial print run of 3,000 copies in three days. Scribner’s reprinted the novel eight times in 1920, and three more in 1921. By the end of 1921, there were 49,075 copies of the novel in circulation, though still not enough to challenge the bestselling works of the period: Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920) sold 295,000 copies in 1921. That said, This Side of Paradise was the benchmark Fitzgerald work against which reviewers measured his later works. In many ways, it was Paradise, not Gatsby, that was his defining achievement.Three of Fitzgerald’s sisters died in infancy or early childhood.
In an entry in his journal for January 1900, Fitzgerald wrote “His mother presented him with a sister who lived only an hour.” This unnamed child followed her sisters Louise Scott Fitzgerald (1892-96), who had died at the age of three, and Mary Ashton Fitzgerald (1894-95), who was only seventeen months old when she died. One sibling would though live into adulthood: Annabel, born on 21 July 1901, outlived her brother by 47 years, dying one day after her birthday in 1987.As a five-year-old boy Fitzgerald visited the Buffalo World’s Fair.
The event that left a lasting impression on both the young Fitzgerald as well as the wider nation, though for very different reasons. The Buffalo Fair, known as the Rainbow City, was renowned for its electrical light displays and attracted eight million visitors to its showgrounds between May and November 1901. The Fitzgeralds visited the Fair in August, a month before Fitzgerald would turn six. The effects of the multi-coloured carnival with an Electric Tower of two million lightbulbs, visible from fifty miles away, were not lost on the young Fitzgerald. When Nick Carraway remarks to Gatsby that his house is lit up “like the World’s Fair” and we read of the multi-coloured lights that bedeck Gatsby’s garden, the connection with the Buffalo Fair is, however subtly, made. That said, it was to be another event at that World’s Fair, in September 1901, which would secure its place in American political – and I would argue fictional – history: the shooting of President William McKinley on 6 September 1901 by Leon Czolgosz.Fitzgerald never graduated from Princeton.
Having enrolled in 1913, Fitzgerald’s interest in numerous extra-curricular activities meant that he dropped out briefly in December 1915, though the end of his seven-month long-distance relationship with Ginevra King no doubt also played a part. Fitzgerald re-enrolled in September 1916 but just over a year later he accepted a commission as an infantry second lieutenant in the US Army and on 20 November he would report to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for preliminary training. Although he never saw active service in World War I, Fitzgerald never completed his degree studies either. His time at Princeton, although it did not have a beneficial effect on Fitzgerald’s terrible spelling, certainly expanded his range of literary interests. This is demonstrated in This Side of Paradise, a novel packed full of references to multiple literary works. Initially, Fitzgerald had ambitions to be a poet rather than a novelist. Of all the poets that interested Fitzgerald, it was John Keats that he most cherished: indeed, in the summer of 1940, the year that Fitzgerald died, he recorded himself reciting Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Fitzgerald’s importance as the definer of his times continues to this day, and his works remain popular almost eight decades after his death.

Feature image: Detail from This Side of Paradise jacket (OUP, 2020).

The post Five things to know about F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared first on OUPblog.

It’s cheaper to preserve the Amazon than we might think

“The cattle need ladders to graze here.” That is what my wife’s relatives used to tell her after they moved to the Amazon rainforest. She visited their farm when she was 13, and the planted grass was taller than she was. Grass grows tall there because of the substantial amount of nutrients left on the ground immediately after deforesting. A few years after clearing the land, though, most nutrients were gone and the grass became thin. That is hardly surprising as the Amazon soil is known to be among the poorest on the planet. By that point, as the locals say, the cattle would need to bend their knees to graze.

Despite the poor soil, the accumulated deforested area in the Brazilian Amazon since 1988 comprises an area larger than California. About two-thirds of that area is used for extensive pasture (the most common land use there). Extensive farming is to be expected in places where land is abundant and of poor quality.

The high deforestation rates have been a source of international concern for at least the past 30 years – and especially in the last two years. There has been many discussions among academics, policy makers, and in society in general, about different ways to curb the deforestation process. Examples of such policies include pre-established limits to deforestation in public and private lands, and the so-called “incentive-based” policies, which – as the name suggests – provide incentives for farmers to not deforest, such as taxing agricultural land or subsidizing forested areas. While all these policies can be effective in preserving forests if properly implemented, monitored, and enforced, their economic costs are not the same. Reducing the costs of policies is an important goal by itself, as it eliminates wasteful expenditures, and it can help avoid political strife. The greater the costs, the less likely are farmers to abide by the rules.

Key to reducing economic costs of environmental policies is to note that, although the soils are generally poor in the Amazon, they are not equally poor. Nor are farmers’ resources or entrepreneurial abilities. Differences in farms’ profitability means that some farmers need to forgo substantial profits to preserve the land, while others lose much less. A cost-effective policy minimizes farmers’ losses by avoiding unnecessary sacrifices. In order to preserve a certain amount of forested area, a cost-effective policy induces farmers who lose less from preservation to preserve larger areas, while inducing farmers who lose more from preservation to sacrifice smaller agricultural areas.

Some environmental policies are considerably more expensive than others. Currently, the Brazilian Forest Code requires that each farm in the Amazon must keep 80% of its area in natural vegetation. There is ample evidence that this rule has not been fully enforced: Forest coverage on private properties there has been approximately 40%. Farmers would lose about US$ 4 billion per year in forgone profits if the legislation were perfectly enforced. Not surprisingly, farmers have tried, systematically, to alter the Forest Code since it was implemented; the senator Flavio Bolsonaro (one of the president’s sons) had even proposed recently to eliminate the 80% rule completely.

In contrast, taxing agricultural land in a way that preserves 80% of forest cover in total would be approximately eight times less costly to farmers (about US$ 480 million per year of forgone profits). This corresponds to a cost saving from the land-use tax of approximately 90% of the cost of a perfectly enforced 80% rule. To have a sense of magnitudes, this is substantially higher than the cost saving estimates from allowance trading in pollution markets, ranging from 20 to 47% of the cost of standard quantitative limits to pollution emissions. Taxing agricultural land puts in place a price for everyone that considers that activity. In this way, the less productive farmers would find it profitable to use less land for agriculture, while the more productive farmers would still use more land and forgo fewer profits. (As a by-product, noting that the most productive farms are located in the south Amazon, toward the edge of the rainforest, forests in the central regions would be more preserved and less fragmented, which is advantageous from a biodiversity point of view.) The 80% rule disregards differences in profitability and so penalizes the more productive farms disproportionally, raising the total costs of the policy (and allowing for more forest fragmentation).

Instead of taxing agriculture, we could subsidize farmers to keep their forested areas. The total economic costs of payments would be similar to taxing, as it similarly puts a price on land use, but with the difference that farmers would not bear the burden of preservation – those who pay to preserve (and presumably benefit from) the forests would bear the conservation costs, which may sound fair. It could be politically difficult to do so in practice, either by taxing Brazilian families and business or by obtaining resources from foreign sources. Still, the benefits could be enormous. If we paid farmers to preserve the land based on the amount of carbon on the ground, a payment as small as US$10 per ton of CO2 per year could virtually eliminate all agricultural land in the Amazon. That is because of the overall low agricultural returns and the large stock of carbon on the ground there.

Evidently, no policy can be successful without efficient monitoring and enforcement systems, which in turn depend on political will – a by-no-means small issue, as we have been experiencing during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Yet Brazil has a well-established, almost real-time, satellite-based monitoring system that have proved to work in deterring deforestation. Also, the country has been in the process of geo-referencing all rural properties, including the location of the required preservation areas within farms. Further, the Forest Code permits farmers who use more agricultural land than allowed by the 80% rule to buy quotas from farms that use less land than required – this effectively allows for a trading quotas market to emerge, which, like taxing or payments, is another “incentive-based” tool that puts a price on land use, and so can be a cost-effective policy.

In sum, despite the current increases in deforestation rates, all these recent advances point to a state with an increased capacity to implement preservation policies with small (or at least as small as possible) economic costs. Hopefully, cattle won’t need to be climbing ladders nor bending their knees, and perhaps not even travelling to the Amazon, to graze in the future.

Featured image credit: Rio Teles Pires by Frederico Oliveira. Photo owned by the author. 

The post It’s cheaper to preserve the Amazon than we might think appeared first on OUPblog.

How water wars hurt marginalized populations

There are 286 international transboundary river basins that are shared by 151 countries. These basins are the source for water as well as livelihoods to 2.8 billion people. In many of these places the already vulnerable and marginalised are at great risk due to problems managing water.

Sudden, sharp changes in these basins are not like that of water wars between states seeking military control over shared waters. Rather, such armed conflict does not happen. Instead, it is floods, droughts or the breakdown of dams that cause sharp changes and grab headlines. Water conflicts evolve around the management of the river to secure water, to install infrastructure, and to harness the economic possibilities of the river.

What does not grab headlines at the time of these sudden changes are the underlying conditions of inequality. In other words, the vulnerable and marginalised are those who feel the impacts of these changes more intensely than others. Moreover, they are faced with everyday struggles to access water and to manage the river for their livelihoods. Weathering any variability to flows or water quality is done by those most dependant on the river, at the cost of their health, safety and livelihoods. They are also the first ones to notice the impact of degraded river ecosystems and the ones with no choice but to somehow mitigate them.

An example is the Mekong River in Southeast Asia which has seen rapid development of dams. In 2018, the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy dam in Laos collapsed, releasing 500 million cubic metres of water and causing fatalities and a reported displacement of over 6000 people. This dam was under construction in the tributary of the Mekong in Lao territory but its proximity to the Cambodian border also meant that downstream communities faced the effects of unexpected water level rise. This dam is one of the many being built to provide hydropower for an increasingly urbanising region, notably to supply demand in Thailand. While the urban dwellers and industries far from dam locations may benefit from hydropower, the rural communities close to these sites observe the changes to the river on a daily basis. Some have been relocated due to the construction, others have attempted to make do with the changing ecosystems and river flows. It is against this context that through the dam collapse villagers have been made homeless or lost possessions without warning. On top of any concerns they may have had about the changing river environment, they will have to deal with the long-term consequences of this incident to their families and livelihoods.

Diplomatic flare ups over water quality control or mounting international tension over the building of dams that prevent water flowing to downstream states may be soothed through handshakes over basin management agreements or the launch of new technical reports.

What might seem like cooperation between states may in fact conceal harms to the vulnerable and marginalised communities. Cooperation done in centres of power far flung from the banks of the river may be touted as sharing water-related benefits between countries. For example, an agreement over the building of a hydropower dam to provide green energy for the region. Or enabling water withdrawal for agricultural projects for high-value goods for export that makes for efficient water use. However, as the Mekong example showed, these projects may bring about a real, qualitative change to efforts at using and accessing water for subsistence farming or river resources such as fish for food. Being blind-sighted by benefits would only normalise the harms the vulnerable and marginalised experience to make these dams and agricultural projects materialise.

Rather than getting caught up with avoiding water conflict, we need to think about the ways to address these harms. We need to ask how water used, when and by whom, and what are the implications of changing them when decisions to develop a river is made. These questions need to be answered with a variety of inputs and knowledge, crucially incorporating those marginalised voices usually left out of mainstream decision-making. Only by posing these questions, can we begin to ask ourselves what alternative ways of managing the river may be possible—an alternative that does not cause fallouts to the already vulnerable and marginalised.

Featured image taken from the cover of Water Conflicts: Analysis for Transformation.

The post How water wars hurt marginalized populations appeared first on OUPblog.

Writing a non-fiction historical thriller

The distinguished biographer, Ben Pimlott, used to say that historians should try to write like novelists. To my knowledge, he never developed the thought, but what he meant was clear. While the historical monograph may make a significant contribution to knowledge, too often it is boring to read. He wanted us to deploy the skills of the writer of fiction, in addition to the tools of the scholar. We should never sacrifice depth of research — but still, we should try to write books people enjoy reading. I’ve been thinking a lot about Ben’s advice lately because I, too, hope to write books people like to read.

Ben wanted us to write descriptively as well as analytically. Take a debate in the House of Commons (as he often did). We should quote it, of course, but also, we should set the scene. We should depict the room, the benches, the men and women sitting on them, or lounging, or standing in the gangways. We should describe the atmosphere.

We should always bring out antagonism and drama if it was present. What was the response to the speech? If there were interruptions, if there was heckling, we should quote that too. If possible, we should pit one speaker against another.

Ben thought we should emphasize character and character development. The reader will want to know not only what a speaker said in that debate, but how saying it was a culmination for him or her, or a betrayal, a personal triumph or a defeat. We should show when a character demonstrates strength or weakness. And, if s/he smiles, or laughs, or cries, we should say so. The reader wants to know what a person was like. But we should never write that a character smiled or laughed if we do not have evidence for it. We should never, ever, make up dialogue. We should never say what someone was thinking – unless we have proof of what they were thinking.

We should comb our sources for the telling detail. We should learn to juxtapose one source against another: it is amazing how Source A may give the lie to Source B, and it is fun to read when it does. In one of my books the protagonist wrote a touching, sensitive letter to his wife when he learned she had just endured a miscarriage. Two days later he wrote in his diary about meeting his lover: “the sun was shining in her hair,” or words to that effect. Quote sources. Show, don’t tell. Reveal character. I am channeling Ben.

As a novelist sometimes stands back, so should we occasionally step outside our narrative in order to summarize where we have gotten to, what the historical documents allow us to reasonably believe, what are the stakes for all our protagonists at a certain juncture, and their hesitations, fears, ambitions, etc. The reader will be grateful.

The structure of the book is important too. Our chapters must build towards a conclusion. Moreover, one chapter must lead naturally into the next. If the material allows, the paragraphs inside the chapter should lead gracefully to a cliffhanger ending.

We must pay attention to how sentences inside those paragraphs read. Usually, I do not use the same word or combination of words twice in a single sentence. But sometimes I do, because it establishes a pleasing cadence. This can be true with two sentences in a row as well: combinations of words appearing first in one, and then in the next, can establish a rhythm or pace that is pleasing to the ear. (If you look back you will see that I have followed my own advice in this little essay.)

Historians have plenty to do as it is: primary research; secondary research; background research; organization of material. Eventually we have to sit down and write a manuscript. When we do so, we aim to make a significant contribution to the relevant literature and to knowledge more generally. But also, surely Ben was right: we should try hard to make the manuscript a pleasure to read.

Featured Image Credit: public domain via Unsplash

The post Writing a non-fiction historical thriller appeared first on OUPblog.