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What does ‘Honest to God’ tell us about Britain’s “secular revolution”?

On 17 March 1963, John Robinson, the Anglican bishop of Woolwich, wrote an article for the Observer entitled “Our Image of God Must Go.” He was writing to advertise his new book, Honest to God, which made a deeply controversial argument: that modern Christians would eventually find it necessary to reject classical theism. God Himself, Robinson argued, was causing a radical revolution in human life, in which human nature was being altered, so that “modern men” [sic] were no longer “religious” but “secular”. In the face of this divine process of “secularization”, the Christian churches had no option but to abandon “religion”, and to embrace a radical new “religionless Christianity”, which would question almost all the tenets of conventional theology, and focus instead on building a glorious new secular social order. These ideas were part of the 1960s global explosion in radical Christianity, which deeply shaped the World Council of Churches, the World Student Christian Federation, and Vatican II.

In Britain, the reaction was intense and immediate: the Church Times wrote angry editorials, the Sunday Telegraph’s reviewer regretted that Robinson could not be defrocked, and the archbishop of Canterbury censured him on television. Nonetheless, Honest to God went on to sell over a million copies, not including its translations into seventeen languages. It was, in the undisputed judgement of its publisher, the fastest-selling new work of serious theology of all time.

But what should historians make of all this? Was Robinson right or wrong, misguided or prophetic? What, if anything, does Honest to God tell us about Britain’s “secular revolution”? The answer depends on what wider view we take of Britain’s Sixties.

According to the orthodox interpretation, which reached its height in the 1990s and early 2000s, Britain’s Sixties was massive and popular: it witnessed a large-scale revolution in attitudes and behaviour. On this view, whatever one thinks of Robinson’s theology, his sociology was essentially correct: it was the case that long-term social processes were causing large numbers of postwar Britons to reject religion and become secular. Robinson was correctly observing contemporary trends, and thinking imaginatively about how to react to them.

In the last fifteen years, however, revisionist historians such as Trevor Harris, Monia O’Brien Castro, and Dominic Sandbrook have contradicted the orthodox account, by arguing that this popular revolution is a myth. Although a minority of cultural radicals were being innovative, the revisionists argue, the central story of the 1960s is modest social change, because mass social change did not occur until the 1970s and 1980s. This perspective implies that Robinson was still correct to identify a systemic process of secularization, even if this process was much more gradual and uneven than his talk of revolution implied.

In the last five years, however, postsecular scholarship has placed postwar secularization debates in their proper historical context, thereby radically challenging these earlier interpretations. In the 1940s and early 1950s, British conventional wisdom had routinely portrayed the Second World War and the early Cold War as spiritual conflicts, which pitted Britain’s “Christian civilization” against Nazi “paganism” and Soviet atheism. This older framework assumed that all societies need a religion or a religion-substitute, such that the decline of British Christianity would inevitably lead to the worship of ersatz-messiahs like Hitler or Stalin. On this view, there could be no permanent “secularization”: the spiritual vacuum left by Christian decline would always be filled by something else. Indeed, it seemed to many commentators, including Clement Attlee, nations which passionately believed in their creeds enjoyed a competitive advantage over those which did not; the quasi-religious fanaticism of the Nazis and the Stalinists was precisely what had made them so effective.

What Robinson was doing, then, was not simply reacting to religious trends: rather, he was helping to transform the entire framework in which they were interpreted. Whereas 1950s conventional wisdom had interpreted church decline as evidence of Britain’s increasing vulnerability to a totalitarian ersatz-religion, Robinson was arguing that church decline was evidence of the rise of a new post-ideological society, and it was this latter view that dominated subsequent British sociology. Whilst Robinson by no means effected this transformation single-handedly, he did write Britain’s best-selling book on secularization. In a society that still regarded itself as Christian, Robinson’s status as a bishop was important in legitimizing what was still a very controversial view.

The first irony, however, which Robinson could not have foreseen, was that during the 1960s these newly authoritative prophecies of permanent “secularization” became importantly self-fulfilling. By reimagining secularity as modern rather than totalitarian, the secularization metanarrative made it possible for large numbers of Britons to reimagine both themselves and their society as “secular”, thus unleashing the postwar “secular revolution”, which decisively reshaped British moral culture and legislation in the 1960s, and British social patterns for the rest of the century. In particular, the exodus from the British churches became dramatic rather than gradual, and the percentages of Britons self-defining as “non-religious” has been steadily increasing ever since.

The second irony is that the terms “religion”, “secular”, and “secularization” are all essentially Christian categories, and that their ubiquity in subsequent historiography demonstrates how profoundly radical Christian thinkers such as Robinson influenced wider secularization debates, and through them the way we think about secularization today. It is only in the 21st century that we can achieve sufficient distance from the Sixties to start historicizing its master-metanarrative of secularization, and to discover that its causes might be radically different from what we first thought.

Featured image by Diana Vargas on Unsplash

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Brexit’s challenge to maritime security

The politics of Britain’s security after Brexit are contentious and fast moving. But most discussion has focused on the security of land. The security of the sea has received less attention.

As a nation of islands, maritime security is of critical importance to the United Kingdom. The UK marine area comprises 298 thousand square miles. Including the UK’s Search and Rescue Zone, which stretches deep into the Atlantic, the area of responsibility exceeds 2 million square miles. In addition, it has an overseas marine area of 2.3 million square thousand miles. At any time there are 1500 large commercial ships off the coast of the UK. The UK has considerable infrastructure in these spaces; including oil rigs, fish farms and wind farms, in addition to seven coastal nuclear power stations, a complex nest of underwater cables and 120 commercial shipping ports. Potential security challenges abound, including the prospect of a terrorist attack on shipping, human trafficking, disruptions to maritime traffic, attacks on maritime infrastructure, and the transportation of illegal drugs, arms, or weapons of mass destruction.

In addition, Brexit could see restrictions on EU fishing vessels in its exclusive economic zone if European collective maritime governance institutions either cease to exist or change dramatically. Such changes could create new demands on the UK to police its waters against illegal fishing and could result in new threats to public order at sea, such as conflicts between British trawlers and fishing vessels from neighbouring states.

Yet, while the UK remains a major naval power, its independent capacities for maritime security outside of the EU are underdeveloped. As late as November 2017, Lord West of Spithead decried the “dreadful hotchpotch of vessels involved” in UK maritime security and called on Parliament to improve capacity in this area.

It is not all bad news. The UK published a National Strategy for Maritime Security in 2014. It also established a National Maritime Information Centre in 2010 to build surveillance and expertise around maritime risks and a Joint Maritime Operations Coordination Centre in 2017 to coordinate the deployment of UK maritime assets across government agencies. Both organisations are increasingly mature and effective and offer critical enabling capacities for UK maritime security operations. The acquisition of new Batch 2 River-class offshore patrol vessels and the decision to retain existing Batch 1 ships in service also represents an important increase in domestic maritime security capacity. Such efforts show how the UK is beginning to grapple with its maritime security challenges.

But in the event of a Brexit of whatever type, British maritime security capacities are likely to be stretched. The very capability and flexibility of the River-class vessels (of which five are currently active, one of which is permanently based in the Falkland Islands) means their availability for day to day patrolling and policing work may be constrained. A range of other agencies, including Border Force, the Marine Management Organisation, and various UK police authorities retain mainly inshore patrol vessels of varying capability. Yet in comparison to countries which invest heavily in maritime security, such as Italy or Japan, these capacities remain fragmented and patchy across the country. Maritime aerial patrol capabilities for everyday maritime security are similarly restricted, with RAF and Royal Navy assets earmarked for more traditional military missions. Radar and other automatic monitoring systems around the British coast are neither complete nor continuous.

What are the lessons for UK policy makers?

First, it is clear that the solution is about more than naval power or the acquisition of new frigates and aircraft carriers. It also means paying attention to those manifold challenges that fall below the threshold of naval priority in the strictest military sense, and concern instead issues of terrorism, marine environmental protection, law enforcement, public order, and safety at sea.

Second, the challenges of maritime security do not respect national borders. By their very nature they take place across and between them. Addressing these issues necessarily involves collaboration and coordination with partners, in areas including governance and regulation, intelligence, infrastructure, and technology. New arrangements with old partners are certainly possible but Brexit in whatever form will prove a stern test of these relations. An acrimonious Brexit may push them to their limit. UK government should attach the utmost importance maintaining positive relations at sea to assure the country’s maritime security after Brexit.

Featured image: “River Class patrol vessels”, Crown copyright 2019 via Royal Navy .

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The Holocaust and the illusions of hindsight

Soren Kierkegaard is often remembered for saying that life can be understood only backwards, even though it must be lived forwards. For a historian like myself this might seem the ultimate vindication of my profession. It’s the knowledge of consequences and outcomes, after all, that enables us to see past events in a clearer light. But Kierkegaard offers a subtler and more sobering lesson. His 1843 journal entry reads: “it is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” In short, Kierkegaard reminds us that the defining condition of our lives is the precisely the absence of later knowledge. Historians’ 20-20 hindsight makes them in a way blind, trapped on the far side of history’s moving wall from the actors they wish to study. Nowhere is this truer than when writing the history of periods of great uncertainty and struggle. The only chance of understanding those caught up in the maelstrom of such moments, is to plunge, as far as that is possible, into the uncertain waters of their present.

I’ve thought about this a lot recently while researching a group of left-wing Germans who opposed the Nazi regime and helped many Jews, saving several lives. For them, and even more for those they helped, the future was more than uncertain. They never knew when there might be a visit by the Gestapo. For a long time, it was unclear whether the Nazi regime would ever be defeated.  By looking at what the group published after the war and by talking to surviving members decades later, I gained some sense of what coping with the stress and anxiety of everyday had been like. Ellen, who gave refuge to a Jewish woman during the war, remembered the moment a late-night knock came to her door. Thankfully, it turned out to be the air-warden telling her to straighten the blackout curtain – she “wanted to give him a hug.”

The only chance of understanding those caught up in the maelstrom of such moments, is to plunge, as far as that is possible, into the uncertain waters of their present.

But while I was reading the group’s early postwar accounts of its actions I had a small revelation: they too were stuck on the other side of history’s wall, separated from their wartime selves. This was not about forgetting, since this was just a couple of years after liberation. Yet the difference between acting yesterday amid ignorance and uncertainty and reflecting the next day, in safety and knowledge, was everything, and involved much more than no longer fearing that late-night knock on the door. Back in 1938, when their group had first stepped up its assistance for Jews, mass murder had not yet begun. Extermination camps and gas chambers were not yet imaginable. After the war, when radio broadcasts revealed to them the nature of Auschwitz, the encouraging words they had given Jewish neighbors whom they had bravely accompanied to deportation centers, or the parcels they had taken to the post office to send to deportees in the East, suddenly took on a different meaning. Unlike their actions then, everything they wrote after the war was in the full knowledge of the monstrous policy of extermination.

Analysts of the Holocaust, and particularly accounts of rescue, have been slow to recognize this difference. Most work on rescue has depended on interviews conducted decades after the event; interviewer and respondent interact in conditions a million miles removed from those in which the helpers had to make their choices. Most tellingly, the notion of rescue itself is often retrospective. At the time, certainly in Nazi Germany, few of those (few) Jews who survived were “rescued” at one specific moment. Instead, they were helped by one person – with a bed, an I.D., some food, a name, an address – and then by another, and by another, and they had to show a great deal of initiative, courage, and ingenuity themselves. If they were lucky, at the end of this chain of initiatives, they survived. In retrospect, they had indeed been rescued – but the verb conveys little of their experience or those of their helpers at the time.

In retrospect, they had indeed been rescued – but the verb conveys little of their experience or those of their helpers at the time.

Perhaps because so many certainties of our own age have recently been called into question, historians in the last few years, and certainly historians of the Holocaust, have become more aware of the need to “live history forwards” and to seek contemporary accounts laid down at the time. In the case of the left-wing group I was working on, for example, in 1939, its leader, Artur Jacobs, wrote to his son about all they were doing for Jews suffering from the legislative onslaught that had befallen them since Kristallnacht. His group was seeking to help the victims rise above their material concerns and recognize what really mattered. The implication was that adversity could be a good thing, offering spiritual liberation to a materially minded people. One might read an antisemitic trope in here, or just a rejection of the values of capitalist society. Either way, it was an observation, and an inspiration for the group’s involvement that by 1945 and probably already by 1942 was completely unsayable. When Auschwitz had become knowledge – no virtue could be found in adversity.

Today we wonder whether we are seeing the end of democracy, the beginning of the end, or just a tragi-comic bubble that will soon burst. Perhaps we dramatize what confronts us, perhaps we underreact to today’s events, we do not know. Constantine Cavafy wrote that Gods have knowledge of the future, “alone and fully enlightened,” and as a historian there is a temptation to offer divine judgment on the past. We must hope that the future chronicler of our times will resist that temptation and seek to understand our actions against the background of our own uncertainty – just as Holocaust historians are learning to do, looking back on the darkest of dark times, when the unbelievable was just around the corner, and who knew what would follow.

Featured image: author’s own, used with permission.

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Understanding the Holocaust in context

Soren Kierkegaard is often remembered for saying that life can be understood only backwards, even though it must be lived forwards. For a historian like myself this might seem the ultimate vindication of my profession. It’s the knowledge of consequences and outcomes, after all, that enables us to see past events in a clearer light. But Kierkegaard offers a subtler and more sobering lesson. His 1843 journal entry reads: “it is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” In short, Kierkegaard reminds us that the defining condition of our lives is the precisely the absence of later knowledge. Historians’ 20-20 hindsight makes them in a way blind, trapped on the far side of history’s moving wall from the actors they wish to study. Nowhere is this truer than when writing the history of periods of great uncertainty and struggle. The only chance of understanding those caught up in the maelstrom of such moments, is to plunge, as far as that is possible, into the uncertain waters of their present.

I’ve thought about this a lot recently while researching a group of left-wing Germans who opposed the Nazi regime and helped many Jews, saving several lives. For them, and even more for those they helped, the future was more than uncertain. They never knew when there might be a visit by the Gestapo. For a long time, it was unclear whether the Nazi regime would ever be defeated.  By looking at what the group published after the war and by talking to surviving members decades later, I gained some sense of what coping with the stress and anxiety of everyday had been like. Ellen, who gave refuge to a Jewish woman during the war, remembered the moment a late-night knock came to her door. Thankfully, it turned out to be the air-warden telling her to straighten the blackout curtain – she “wanted to give him a hug.”

The only chance of understanding those caught up in the maelstrom of such moments, is to plunge, as far as that is possible, into the uncertain waters of their present.

But while I was reading the group’s early postwar accounts of its actions I had a small revelation: they too were stuck on the other side of history’s wall, separated from their wartime selves. This was not about forgetting, since this was just a couple of years after liberation. Yet the difference between acting yesterday amid ignorance and uncertainty and reflecting the next day, in safety and knowledge, was everything, and involved much more than no longer fearing that late-night knock on the door. Back in 1938, when their group had first stepped up its assistance for Jews, mass murder had not yet begun. Extermination camps and gas chambers were not yet imaginable. After the war, when radio broadcasts revealed to them the nature of Auschwitz, the encouraging words they had given Jewish neighbors whom they had bravely accompanied to deportation centers, or the parcels they had taken to the post office to send to deportees in the East, suddenly took on a different meaning. Unlike their actions then, everything they wrote after the war was in the full knowledge of the monstrous policy of extermination.

Analysts of the Holocaust, and particularly accounts of rescue, have been slow to recognize this difference. Most work on rescue has depended on interviews conducted decades after the event; interviewer and respondent interact in conditions a million miles removed from those in which the helpers had to make their choices. Most tellingly, the notion of rescue itself is often retrospective. At the time, certainly in Nazi Germany, few of those (few) Jews who survived were “rescued” at one specific moment. Instead, they were helped by one person – with a bed, an I.D., some food, a name, an address – and then by another, and by another, and they had to show a great deal of initiative, courage, and ingenuity themselves. If they were lucky, at the end of this chain of initiatives, they survived. In retrospect, they had indeed been rescued – but the verb conveys little of their experience or those of their helpers at the time.

In retrospect, they had indeed been rescued – but the verb conveys little of their experience or those of their helpers at the time.

Perhaps because so many certainties of our own age have recently been called into question, historians in the last few years, and certainly historians of the Holocaust, have become more aware of the need to “live history forwards” and to seek contemporary accounts laid down at the time. In the case of the left-wing group I was working on, for example, in 1939, its leader, Artur Jacobs, wrote to his son about all they were doing for Jews suffering from the legislative onslaught that had befallen them since Kristallnacht. His group was seeking to help the victims rise above their material concerns and recognize what really mattered. The implication was that adversity could be a good thing, offering spiritual liberation to a materially minded people. One might read an antisemitic trope in here, or just a rejection of the values of capitalist society. Either way, it was an observation, and an inspiration for the group’s involvement that by 1945 and probably already by 1942 was completely unsayable. When Auschwitz had become knowledge – no virtue could be found in adversity.

Today we wonder whether we are seeing the end of democracy, the beginning of the end, or just a tragi-comic bubble that will soon burst. Perhaps we dramatize what confronts us, perhaps we underreact to today’s events, we do not know. Constantine Cavafy wrote that Gods have knowledge of the future, “alone and fully enlightened,” and as a historian there is a temptation to offer divine judgment on the past. We must hope that the future chronicler of our times will resist that temptation and seek to understand our actions against the background of our own uncertainty – just as Holocaust historians are learning to do, looking back on the darkest of dark times, when the unbelievable was just around the corner, and who knew what would follow.

Featured image: author’s own, used with permission.

The post Understanding the Holocaust in context appeared first on OUPblog.

Phyllis Tate – A Family Portrait

Colin and Celia Frank, the children of 20th-century composer Phyllis Tate, reflect on her life and works. 

Phyllis Tate, or Phyl as she was known to her friends, worked in what was then very much a man’s world, epitomized by a photo of members of the Composers’ Guild in which she is the only woman. She disliked the term ‘woman composer’, wishing to be known as a “good composer: the fact that I am a woman is irrelevant.” Despite this, her first enthusiast was composer and redoubtable champion for women’s rights, Dame Ethel Smyth. As Phyl recounts in her delightful and typically deprecating autobiography, Dame Ethel Smyth “asked to see and hear my Cello Concerto which I strummed out ff for her. At the end she said: ‘At last I have heard a real woman composer!’ But let me add hastily that as the poor dear was virtually stone deaf, I didn’t take this vociferous praise too literally.”

Phyl received constant encouragement—and criticism—from her husband Alan Frank who became Head of the music department at Oxford University Press in 1954. Their initial bond was formed on a fervent dislike of Beethoven. They also entertained pub customers, Alan playing on the clarinet and Phyl on the ukulele. This affection for popular music remained with Phyl all her life and is reflected in much of her music.

In those days, without the help of computers, scoring a large-scale work was an arduous and labour-intensive task. As a relief, and in the hope of finding an easier way to make a living, she teamed up with a neighbour to run a gourmet fish and chip stall at the local bus terminus. The plan was that the burly Scottish husband of her partner would trundle the cart up and down to its location, in between his stint as oboist at Sadler’s Wells Opera House. Despite becoming a member of the Fish Fryers’ Association and subscribing to the Fish Fryers’ Gazette (delivered on the same day as Music and Letters), licensing proved too formidable, and the project was abandoned.

Both Phyl and her indefatigable husband got immense enjoyment out of travel, both in Britain and abroad. They rented a miniscule workers cottage in East Suffolk for £12 a year, with windows so small that the curtains were tea-towels. They loved walking in the placid countryside, relishing in the soft light and bracing sea air, and on the drive there and back they delighted in visiting country houses, churches, and country pubs.

Photo by Heiko Sandelmann, Stadttheater Bremerhaven, from a 2018 performance of Phyllis Tate’s The Lodger.

Back in their Hampstead home they frequently had musician friends to supper. Phyl was a proficient cook, having done a Cordon Bleu course in London. Frequent visitors were American composer Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the now classic scores for Alfred Hitchcock’s films, Welsh composer Alun Hoddinott, Ursula Vaughan-Williams, and Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany.

At family suppers, however, Phyl often seemed preoccupied and would abruptly leave the table, go to her music room, and thump out chords, striving for the sound she wanted. Alan and Phyl were true soul mates, and our calm home life gave us the support and freedom we needed. Many of our less fortunate childhood friends found refuge and warm welcome in our house.

She also had to run the house and bring up two children, which she did with a the help of a bevy of eccentrics: the confirmed bachelor with dyed blonde hair, whose tea drinking far outdid his nominal cleaning, the one-armed window cleaner, and the widow who washed the snow to keep it “nice and white.” Despite Alan’s impatience with these barely-effective helpers, Phyl would not consider their dismissal.

Phyl was introspective and a foil to her more gregarious husband. Both were unimpressed by status and intellectual pretence, and easily made friends both with the local people of Suffolk and on their many travels. Her conversation was sharp and laced with quirky humour. She also had a gift for writing, despite the most rudimentary education, having been expelled from her school at the age of ten for singing a bawdy song taught to her by her father.

But there was another side to Phyl, what she termed her “morbid disposition.” Her lifelong pre-occupation with death is reflected in much of her music. This was probably due in part to her growing up and living through the slaughter and destruction of two world wars, as well as her later struggles against ill health. One of her earliest, most well-known works is her 1946 setting of “Nocturne for Four Voices” by the Second World War poet Sidney Keyes: it is haunting and sombre, with exquisite musical timbres from an unusual combination of instruments. This was followed by her setting of Tennyson’s pre-Raphaelite ballad “The Lady of Shalott”, her opera The Lodger, in which the protagonist is Jack the Ripper, and her setting of Shakespeare’s enigmatic threnody “The Phoenix and the Turtle”.

Ultimately, music was Phyl’s life but, with her meticulous and perfectionist nature, composing was not easy for her. As she said, “writing music is hell: the only thing worse is not writing it.”

View a complete list of Phyllis Tate’s works here.

Featured image credit: The Frank Family.

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How rivers can help in climate change resilience

Resilience–the ability of a substance to spring back into shape—is a much-desired characteristic. Resilience is also the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, or toughness. As people and societies, we crave resilience to the difficulties imposed upon us, including those of our own making. Accelerating change in the climate that influences every aspect of our existence is one of the most frightening of those difficulties. Increasingly, I see news headlines and scholarly articles discussing how to increase resilience to climate change.

In my part of the world, the drylands of the interior western United States, declining precipitation is the most frightening aspect of climate change. Limited water has long defined this region, as recognized in the evolutionary adaptations of plants and animals, the cultural adaptations of Native Americans, and the technological adaptations of European Americans. We have dammed, diverted, and pumped our surface and ground waters into a highly engineered plumbing system to serve our deepening thirst, and we have sometimes saved a pittance of water to aid the survival of native plants and animals. But the continued functioning of our elaborate water engineering depends on continued rain and snow. It is these that climate change jeopardizes, so we speak of developing resilience in our water supplies.

The Rocky Mountains are Colorado’s water tower. Having largely polluted or depleted our shallow ground water supplies, we depend heavily on snowmelt that spreads outward in all directions from the Rockies. As a river scientist, the resilience of these rivers is often on my mind and governs the questions that I ask.

Image credit: Photo of river by Ellen Wohl. Used with permission.

River scientists have thought about this for decades and we have a good understanding of what has been done and what should be done to enhance river resilience.

What creates resilience in rivers? Buffers.

Image credit: Photo of beaver by Ellen Wohl. Used with permission.

Rivers create buffers of space and connectivity. Rivers are channels connected to floodplains so that water and sediment rushing downstream during a flood can spread across the valley bottom and move downstream more slowly, leaving sediment as nourishing floodplain deposits in which new plants can germinate. A channel connected vertically to a thick wedge of underlying sediment can remove harmful nitrates and increase the dissolved oxygen of river water that filters through the sediment before returning to the surface. A channel can also allow fish and other organisms to move up- and downstream to find refuge during flood or drought.

Rivers also create buffers of diversity. Rivers promote physical diversity by creating side eddies, pools, side channels, differently sized sediment, and floodplains with lakes and marshes. Physical diversity means habitat diversity and habitat diversity supports biological diversity. Protected from predators, juvenile fish can grow large in the shallow, warm waters of side channels. Fish that need muddy bottoms and cattails can thrive in the floodplain marshes, and fish that need clear, cold water and gravel beds for spawning can thrive in the main channel.

Plants that root below the water surface can grow in new ponds and plants that like wet soil can grow in older ponds that are gradually filling with sediment. Spatially diverse channels and floodplains provide sites of refuge during floods, droughts, and other disturbances – some portion of the river valley is more likely to have slower flow during the flood or to retain standing water during the drought.

Image credit: “Moose by the river” by Ellen Wohl. Used with permission.

Space, connectivity, and diversity are the product of river work through time. The environment through which the river flows is neither passive nor uniform. Trees fall into the channel, forming logjams that obstruct the flow. Big boulders resist erosion, forcing the channel to bend around them. During floods, water ponds at the logjams and boulders, spilling onto the floodplains and surging into the subsurface to create lateral and vertical connectivity.

Natural rivers have a high level of resilience: a plethora of plant and animal species have persisted in rivers for millions of years, despite flood and drought. I worry about their continued persistence under a changing climate because of how people have reduced the resilience of rivers. We have constrained their space with levees, channelization, and stabilized banks and beds. We have disconnected them with dams, diversions, and levees. We have homogenized them by regulating the flow, removing obstacles within the channel, and manipulating the channel boundaries. To the extent possible, we have made rivers into canals.

There is no quick fix for the centuries of engineering that have reduced the resilience of rivers and made river ecosystems and human societies more vulnerable to a warmer, drier climate. But there are remedies, and these must start with recognition of the buffers that create and sustain river resilience.

Featured Image Credit: Wheaton BM fire by Joe Wheaton. Used with permission.

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Fingers feel, or feel free!

Now that I have said everything I know about the etymology of the word finger (see the posts on feeling fingers), and those who agree and disagree with me have also made their opinion public, one more topic has to be discussed, namely, the origin of the verb feel.

These are the basic facts. The verb feel has been attested only in West Germanic. Old English had fēlan, from fōljan, and the forms in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German go back to the same root. All the rest is intelligent guessing. Naturally, since the Germanic root is fōl, the search concentrated on the non-Germanic root pōl, with the p ~ f correspondence by the indispensable First Consonant Shift (my recurring reference is to Engl. father versus Latin pater). Long o, that is, ō, alternates with short a, that is, ă, by ablaut, and the root pal surfaced early in the discussion of feel. Latin palpare “to touch,” familiar from palpitate and palpable, presented itself as a possible cognate, even though the comparison ignores the presence of final p in palp-.

That is what feelers are for! Image by Zeimusu, CC by-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The original meaning of feel was “to touch, examine by touching,” as in “We… felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches” in The Great Gatsby (the beginning of Chapter 8). The metaphorical sense, as in I felt nothing, came later. Assuming for the moment that palpare and feel are related, we may wonder what the origin of the Latin verb is. Palp– begins with and ends in the same consonant and sounds a bit like Engl. plop or pulp. Plop is sound-imitative. Pulp, from Latin, is a word of unknown origin, and, incidentally, so is pulpit, also from Latin. One can always suggest a borrowing from an unknown language (and this has been done for pulpit), but equally probable is the conjecture that we are dealing with sound-symbolic or sound-imitative formations, even though it remains unclear what they “symbolize” or imitate. Engl. plop is of course not a problem.

What do pulp and pulpit have in common? Both words are of unknown origin and may be sound-symbolic. Pulp image by Hans Braxmeier via Pixabay; pulpit of Gerona Church by Ramon FVelasquez, CC by-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Palpare is perhaps not wholly opaque. If the concept of feeling goes back to touching gently and caressing with the fingers (such is the common and seemingly reasonable opinion), there may be something in the complex palp that suggests such a movement: plop is loud, while palp is soft and pacifying. With these fantasies and the mysterious pulpit behind us, we may return to feel or rather fōl ~ făl, and on our way back to Germanic pay attention to Engl. floss “rough silk,” from French floche, from Old French flosche “down; pile of velvet.” Down and velvet are certainly soft and gentle to the touch.

Germanic exhibits numerous verbs beginning with fl-, some of which I have discussed more than once in connection with the verb flatter. (The other group, connected with the Engl. F-word, such as fickle and fidget, poses similar questions.) Their sound-symbolic or sound-imitative origin is rather obvious. The list contains flutter, flitter, flicker, flit, fling, flounder, flip, flap (compare also flip-flap and flippant), flop, flirt, and quite a few others, including flow. Flip is especially instructive, because the noun fillip “a flick of the finger” may be related to it. Fillip contains the group fl with a vowel between f and l, and we are reminded of feel, from fōl.

Especially characteristic is Old Icelandic fitla “to fumble; fidget,” a doublet of fipla (the same meaning); the latter resembles Engl. fillip and flip, mentioned above. Contrary to what is said in some sources, Germanic fōljan, the ancestor of Engl. feel, is hardly related to Latin palma “palm of the hand,” with congeners elsewhere (Old English had folm), because we touch things with fingers rather than with an open palm. Old Icelandic falma “to fumble, grope around” (Modern Icelandic fálma), a doublet of felma and a close synonym of fitla, bears a strong resemblance to feel, but its relation to palma is far from certain.

Feeling fingers. Image in the public domain via Max Pixel.

Felma reemerges in felmtr “alarm, fear,” felmta “to feel frightened,” and a related Gothic word that also means “frightened.” If, as Guðbrandur Vigfússon, the author of the great Old Icelandic dictionary, suggested in passing, the idea behind “fright” is “trepidation” (I am not sure whether he was the first to think so), that is, “tremor, tremulous agitation,” then we return to the idea of fitful movement, and a tenuous link is established between feel and the Icelandic words cited here.

It will have become clear by this time that, according to my suggestion, feel (from fōljan) is possibly one of many fl-verbs, denoting unsteady movement. As a rule, no vowel appears between f and l in them, but, just as flip appears to have produced fillip, another verb with a vowel inside our sound-symbolic and sound-imitative group might arise. If such is the origin of feel, it gives confirmation to Ari Hoptman’s idea that finger is also one of such f-words.

Scholars, it will be remembered, fear only two situations. They are either afraid of being original (how can I be right if no one else thinks so?) and of being non-original (what is the point of my work if I have nothing new to say?). It pleases me to report that in my treatment of feel I am half-original and thus enjoy the best of both worlds. Latin palpare has often been compared with Greek psállō “to pluck strings” (recognizable from Engl. psalm), as well as with some words beginning with psēl– and meaning “to stutter, stammer.” All of them have been tentatively explained as symbolic, that is, evoking the idea of touching, vibrating, plucking, and trembling.

Germanic fōljan “to feel” may be one of such words. If this conjecture has merit, it is not necessary to treat palpare, along with its problematic kin, and feel as cognates. Rather, they owe their origin to the same impulse. The origin of sound-imitative words is usually transparent: splash, hush, crack, creak, croak, moo, and the rest. By contrast, the presence of sound symbolism cannot be proved, though decades of research have shown that people do describe certain sound groups and even individual sounds in terms of various emotions. Some such vowels, consonants, and their combinations are regularly called warm, cold, gentle, harsh, pleasant, repellent, and so forth (students of phonetics are aware of metaphorical terms like soft n, thick l, and so on). The line between sound imitation and sound symbolism is often hard to draw.

The material at our disposal bears out the hypothesis that speakers associate f-l and p-l (the hyphen stands for a possible vowel) with vibrating, caressing, and touching. We probably have no way of discovering the psychological roots of this association.

The discovery of cognates of sound-symbolic words is often impossible. Yet some conclusions can be drawn. Comparing feel with palm and its related forms in Germanic (such as Old Engl. folm) does not carry conviction, because, to repeat, one does not normally “feel” with the palm, but, if folm goes back to the same symbolic intention, then, in some vague way, they may belong together. They are like a bunch of thin mushrooms on a stump: rootless but similar, or like a group of people in uniform: belonging together but unrelated. The often cited Slavic palets “finger” is a suspicious cognate of feel, because, as said in the post on finger, in the beginning the word meant “thumb,” not a typical “feeling” limb.

By this time you probably feel my pain. If you want to have a near-complete survey of the literature on feel and if you can read German, consult Volume 4, pp. 634-38, of the splendid etymological dictionary of Old High German (Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen). Satisfaction guaranteed.

Feature image credit: Fungi on a log by sylvia duckworth. CC by-SA 2.0, via Geograph.

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How to speak rugby

The rugby World Cup kicked off on Friday 20 September, with the final taking place on Saturday 2 November in Yokohama. Teams from 20 countries have been competing for the Webb Ellis Cup, named for William Webb Ellis, the Rugby schoolboy who is credited with inventing the game when he picked up the ball during a game of football. For the uninitiated, the commentary on a rugby game – foot-up, hand-off, head-up, put-in, knock-on – can make it sound more like a dance routine than the bruising sport it really is. If you don’t know your forwards from your backs, or have no idea why a player might opt to go blind, this guide is for you.

In a game of rugby, each team has fifteen players; the eight forwards make up the pack or scrum (an abbreviated form of scrummage). Although a set-scrum is intended to be an orderly way of restarting play, it is often a good deal more chaotic, reflecting its roots in skirmish “an episode of irregular or unpremeditated fighting” between armies or fleets of ships. Scrums that are more informal are called mauls (from a medieval term for striking someone with a heavy weapon, originally Latin malleus “hammer”) or rucks (from a Scandinavian word for a heap or stack—related to rick “haystack”). The technical difference between the two is whether the ball is in the hand or on the ground—a distinction that can be difficult to apply when lying underneath a heap of bodies and being trampled on by studded boots.

The front row is made up of a hooker (so called because his job is to hook the ball out of the back of the scrum), supported by two props. Behind them are the second row (or locks), while the back row (originally used of a chorus line of dancers) consists of two flankers (from the term used for the outer edges of an army) and a number eight. The forwards’ job is to outshove the opponent’s pack so as to deliver the ball to the seven backs, or three-quarters: the scrum–half, fly-half, wingers, and full-back. These positions were originally termed half-backs or quarter-backs—the latter is now a key role in an American football team.

The aim of the game is to touch the ball down over the opponents’ goal-line, thereby scoring a try—so-called because it wins the right to try to kick a goal. A try was originally known as a touchdown, another rugby term that is better known for its use in American football (although ironically there is no requirement to touch the ball on the ground). Kicking a goal, or converting a try (once known quaintly as majorizing), is achieved by kicking the ball through the upright posts.

A distinctive feature of rugby is that the ball can only be passed backwards. As well as the forward pass, players should avoid the hospital pass—where the ball is offloaded to a team mate just as a burly opponent prepares to make a crunching tackle; the name derives from the likelihood of the recipient requiring hospital treatment. There are various types of tackle: some—like the ankle tap—sound quite gentlemanly, while others—the choke, crash, dump, smother, and spear tackles, decidedly more brutal. The late tackle (carried out after the ball has been passed) is really a euphemism for an attack on an opponent without the ball. Given the rather physical nature of the game, it is perhaps not surprising to find players getting injured, or what rugby players themselves refer to dismissively as getting a knock. A blood injury requires a player to leave the field in order to receive treatment (generally in the form of the magic sponge, a sponge soaked in cold water, which appears to cure all ailments) in the blood bin (not to be confused with the sin bin to which a player goes following a yellow card).

Instead of passing, a player may opt to kick the ball using one of several methods: the drop-kick (when the ball is kicked as it hits the ground), punt (kicked before hitting the ground, from a dialect word meaning ‘push forcefully’), place–kick, up-and-under (also known as the Garryowen after an Irish rugby club in Limerick), or grubber (which runs along the ground). Less orthodox is the hack (from an Old English word meaning “cut in pieces”)—an intentional kicking of an opponent’s shins instead of the ball.

The current holders are New Zealand, whose pre-match ritual is the haka, a ceremonial Maori war dance. There is no sight more guaranteed to make you glad that you are watching from the safety of your own living-room than 15 huge Kiwis performing this intimidating display.

Featured image: Rugby Pitch by Tomas Serer, public domain via Unsplash.

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Fake news gone viral: How misunderstanding scientific uncertainty leads to epidemics

Recently, I went to a top oral surgeon at a university hospital to have a fairly routine procedure. While I was being prepped for surgery the attending nurse took me through the usual battery of questions: Are you on any medications? Who is your emergency contact? Will you accept blood if necessary? And so on. This time, however, I was asked a question that surprised me: Have you, or anyone you have been in contact with, had the measles or symptoms of the measles? The question stood out to me because I have not been asked this sort of question in the past 20 years. Why has this been added to the barrage of pre-treatment questions?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that over 1200 individual cases of measles have been confirmed in the US as of 15 August 2019. That is just for 2019! This is particularly shocking given that measles was declared eliminated in the US just under twenty years ago in 2000. How in the world can an eliminated illness come back with more and more cases each year? (There have already been almost four times as many cases of measles in 2019 as there were in 2018.) The answer seems to be because we stop doing what is required to keep measles, and other illnesses for which we have vaccines, from coming back—some people simply are not getting vaccinated. Perhaps unsurprisingly the unvaccinated make up the majority of this year’s cases of measles.

A cynic might be content to conclude that the anti-vaxxers are reaping what they have sown, and that is that. After all, the majority of those who contracted measles were unvaccinated. This stance is problematic for at least a couple reasons though. First, some of those who got the measles were vaccinated. This happens because, unfortunately, no vaccine is 100% effective. The recommended two doses of MMR are about 97% effective for preventing measles. Second, not everyone who is not vaccinated is an anti-vaxxer. For example, the CDC recommended schedule for the MMR vaccine has children receiving their first dose, which is around 93% effective, when they are 12-15 months old and the second dose when they are 4-6 years old. So, children under a year old whose parents follow the CDC’s recommendations are at high risk of contracting measles, if exposed. Hence, while anti-vaxxers are causing the problem, and some are suffering for their actions, they are not the only ones in danger.

What should we do? One obvious answer is that we need everyone – who is not unable for a legitimate medical reason – to get vaccinated. How can we do this though? Forcing anti-vaxxers to receive vaccinations seems to be a serious violation of autonomy. And, while the intention behind a policy of forced vaccinations might be good, such a policy opens doors for paternalism. A better option involves education. It is plausible that at the heart of the anti-vaxx movement there is ignorance. Perhaps in some cases the ignorance is willful, or even culpable, but in other cases it may not be. Regardless, ignorance is a problem. Anti-vaxxers, like many Americans, are woefully undereducated when it comes to uncertainty.

When an anti-vaxxer learns that vaccines are not 100% certain to be effective and not absolutely certain to have no adverse effects (because there are some in very rare cases), they may be apt to think that the science relied upon in developing and distributing such vaccines is lacking. This thinking, of course, involves a number of mistakes. It is a mistake to think that uncertainty implies flawed science. Uncertainty is inherent in all science—it actually makes science advance. Likewise, it is a mistake to think that since there is some slight risk of adverse effects from vaccination that that somehow undermines the much, much higher risk of adverse effects from not vaccinating.

Part of the problem here seems to be, as psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has said, “our educational system has an amazing blind spot concerning risk literacy. We teach our children the mathematics of certainty — geometry and trigonometry — but not the mathematics of uncertainty, statistical thinking.” We fail to teach the sort of skills that are necessary for truly understanding and dealing with uncertainty. Perhaps with more training in the nature of uncertainty and how to make decisions when faced with it, we can work toward removing the ignorance that threatens us with epidemics of illnesses that should have stayed eliminated.

Featured image credit: Vaccines Save Lives by Johnny Silvercloud. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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How James Glaisher discovered the jet stream

Among many other, more stereotypical features, Scotland is famous as a place where palm trees can grow. And grow they do, with several proud, albeit slightly weather-beaten examples dotted around the mountainous islands and coasts of the western Highlands, blissfully unaware that they share latitudes with the southernmost Canadian tundra. This feat is often attributed to the gentle, warming influence of the Gulf Stream, bringing tropical seawater right up to the mouths of the lochs. But perhaps there is more to this story.

The Gulf Stream is indeed a great ocean current, transporting huge quantities of warm, tropical water northward. It’s like a river within the ocean, and it carries a thousand times the water that our greatest rivers on land do. But the Gulf Stream lies over 3000 kilometres away from Scotland. It begins life in the Gulf of Mexico and then tracks up the eastern coasts of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas before peeling away from the shore at Cape Hatteras. Soon after, it breaks up into a myriad of smaller, meandering currents and is lost in the swirling masses of the Atlantic Ocean.

Relatively warm seawater from the south does indeed help to keep European winters mild, but while some of this water will have passed along the Gulf Stream recently, much has arrived courtesy of quite different ocean currents. And it certainly can’t be described as tropical any more.

The myth of the Gulf Stream was already widely believed in Victorian times, when two lesser-known explorers were pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. This was the age of the aeronauts, when daring celebrity-scientists probed the atmosphere to ever greater heights in perilous balloon ascents.

James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell are best known for a dramatic ascent in 1862, in which they launched from Wolverhampton and reached heights above the top of Everest within an hour. While clearly impressive, this was perhaps not Glaisher’s finest hour. He is immortalised in a famous sketch of the day, frostbitten and “insensible at the height of seven miles” while Coxwell rescues them, incredibly by climbing up into the balloon’s rigging to release a trapped rope with his teeth.

Image credit: ‘Mr. Glaisher insensible at the height of seven miles’ A sketch from 1871, originally published in the London Illustrated News. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Glaisher and Coxwell went on to perform many less eventful but highly successful ascents, recording invaluable data of the upper atmosphere. Glaisher, already a fellow of the Royal Society, would later lead the Royal Meteorological Society as its president. On one trip in 1864 he noted a characteristic warm, south-westerly wind blowing above the country, and his thoughts proved to be well over a hundred years ahead of their time. Writing in the British Quarterly Review in 1871, he noted:

The meeting with this SW current is of the highest importance, for it goes far to explain why England possesses a winter temperature so much higher than is due to our northern latitudes. Our high winter temperature has hitherto been mostly referred to the influence of the Gulf Stream. Without doubting the influence of this natural agent, it is necessary to add the effect of a parallel atmospheric current to the oceanic current coming from the same regions – a true aerial Gulf Stream.

Glaisher was right: the prevailing south-westerly winds that dominate across much of Europe are at least as important in maintaining our mild winter climate as the ocean currents are. These winds bring relatively warm air from parts of the Atlantic further south, just enough to protect the brave palm trees of the north. And as Glaisher suspected, the prevailing winds we feel down at the surface are just the underbelly of a giant atmospheric current above us. His “aerial Gulf Stream” is now also widely known. It is none other than the jet stream.

These two great currents are often confused but the distinction is clear: while the Gulf Stream is a giant river of seawater flowing along the American coast, the jet stream is a veritable river of air which snakes its way around the whole northern hemisphere, profoundly shaping the regional climate patterns of the planet below. A great divider, the jet stream forms as a sharp barrier between warm, tropical air to the south and cold, polar air to the north. Surges of cold in much of Europe, as exemplified by the dreaded Beast from the East, arise when the jet stream is diverted south, starving us of Glaisher’s warm south-westerlies and leaving us stranded on the cold, northern side of the jet.

Today we are well aware of the jet stream, and its swings and meanders are the principal actors in countless weather forecasts. A new generation of scientists is probing the unknown, albeit largely from the safety of a computer terminal. But as greenhouse gases accumulate and the world warms, a new threat is emerging. Climate change is altering the balance of temperatures between the warm and cold sides of the jet, and the future of the jet stream itself hangs in this balance.

Featured image credit: ‘Falling stars as observed from the balloon’. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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