Oxford University Press's Blog, page 194

What makes the EU, the UN, and their peers legitimate?

The first “Brexit” is almost a century old, and it did not even involve Britain. It occurred on 14 June 1926, when Brazil notified the League of Nations it would leave the world organization. Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Venezuela, and Peru, together with Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan, followed in the 1930s. These mass withdrawals from the League were widely interpreted as a sign that the organization was in crisis.

Brexit is not a singular phenomenon. In legal terms, it constitutes a withdrawal of a member state from an intergovernmental organization, though with a profound effect on the organization being left. Since World War II, such withdrawals may have been less spectacular but they have occurred frequently. When the US left the International Labour Organization in 1977, for example, the consequences for the organization were severe. In 1984/85 when the US, the UK and Singapore withdrew from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, the institution noted plainly that  its “budget [dropped] considerably.” And when Morocco left the Organisation of African Unity in 1984, the pan-African organization no longer represented Africa as a whole.

Recently, several African states backed a call for mass withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, raising pressure on the court. Elsewhere, Venezuela has announced its exit from the Organization of American States. In France, the 2017 campaign saw Jean-Luc Mélenchon promising to lead his country out of the IMF, the World Bank and NATO should he win the presidential election. In the United States, Donald Trump withdrew from the hard-won Paris Agreement within months of his presidential tenure. And in Switzerland as well as in the UK, the public ponders about the possibility of leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights behind.

If Brexit is not a single phenomenon, what is it then? It is the most visible instance of a much larger development in which international organizations like the EU have come under intense social and political pressures.

[Brexit] is the most visible instance of a much larger development in which international organizations like the EU have come under intense social and political pressures.

To a considerable degree, these mounting pressures have to do with membership growth (the UN’s 193 members make forging a consensus very difficult), with global power shifts (Brazil, China, and India are asking for more rights within international organizations), and with authority gains (states have delegated more competences to international organizations to manage the consequences of globalization). Beyond these well-known sources, however, our ideas about the legitimacy of international organizations have also changed. In short, international organizations find it ever more challenging to gain and maintain legitimacy with relevant audiences. This is not necessarily because their work has deteriorated, but rather because the expectations we associate with their work have expanded significantly.

Traditionally, the UN and its peers counted as legitimate if they served the interests of their member states. Today, they need to do more. Most importantly, they need to demonstrate not only how they serve their member states, but also how their activities benefit a broad range of stakeholders, including private donors, business corporations, and individuals in member states. Examples of this trend abound: the UN’s reformed development agenda stresses to leave no one behind, the WTO is now concerned with labour standards and seeks to be a democratic international organization, the African Union calls itself a “people-centered” organization, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature no longer protects nature just for nature’s sake but human well-being.

Moreover, the legitimacy of international organizations is no longer only tied to what they accomplish, but also to the processes by which their outputs come about. To be considered as legitimate, international organizations like the WTO for instance need to be transparent and accountable in their decision-making. They need to offer ways for civil society organizations to contribute to their work. The WTO is required to coordinate its activities with other organizations like the World Bank and the IMF.

In the context of an expanding list of legitimacy criteria, international organizations are increasingly caught in the crossfire of critique. While some of this critique is warranted, another part simply stems from national governments’ (and other actors’) routinely claiming successes for themselves but blaming failures on the international organisation headquartered in Brussels, Strasbourg, Geneva or New York. The expanding menu of legitimation facilitates such blame shifting.

Brexit not only marks a turning point for the UK and for the EU; it also matters globally. Seen in a broader context, it symbolizes the end of the post-1990 era of global governance. Yet we will be unable to govern the globe without the services international organizations offer. Getting international cooperation back on track will therefore require governments to defy the blame game. Brexit is not just David Cameron’s fault. But like after World War II, getting international cooperation back on track will also require the world to come together to rethink how global bodies could work. Let’s argue about what makes the EU, the UN, and their peers legitimate (again).

Image credit: United Nations Office at Geneva by Falcon® Photography. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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What makes arrogant people so angry?

Arrogant people are often intolerant of questioning or criticism. They respond to genuine and even polite challenges with anger. They are bullies that attempt to humiliate and intimidate those who do not agree with, or explicitly defer to, their opinions. The arrogant feel superior to other people and arrogate for themselves special privileges. This sense of entitlement and desire to keep others’ down explains the anger, intolerance of criticism, and the bullying behaviour that is characteristic of those who are arrogant.

Ordinarily, when speakers put forward in conversation a claim as true they acquire responsibilities to their audience, and are entitled to expect respectful treatment in return. Speakers owe to their audiences that they are sincere, that they have good reasons to believe that what they are saying is true, and that they are prepared to defend their views against legitimate challenges. The arrogant behave as if no challenges to their views were ever legitimate. That is, they behave as if their claims had the special authoritativeness of verdicts.

There are circumstances in which some people are called to issue verdicts. These are cases where people, by virtue of their roles as jurors or referees, have the unique authority to make claims that are based on the facts of the matter, but that are not open to debate by other members of the community. There are generally procedures for challenging verdicts but verdicts are unlike ordinary claims. Only special authorities have the power to issue them.

Arrogant people think of themselves as special authorities in virtue of their alleged superiority. This is why they treat questioning as illegitimate. They also think of criticism as insulting because it indicates a failure to acknowledge their alleged authoritativeness. Hence, they respond to it angrily. Anger is a negative emotion directed at someone who is perceived as intentionally harming or slighting one or what one holds dear. It is also accompanied by a desire to retaliate or get even. Arrogant people perceive criticism as insulting, since it is tantamount to treating the arrogant person as an ordinary person. Arrogant people think that they are not ordinary. They believe that they are superior and they demand to be treated as such.

Intimidation and humiliation are among the ways in which arrogant people retaliate in anger. These behaviours are designed to lower the status of others. They, thus, are particularly effective means of preserving arrogant people’s superior rank in the community. Those who are on the receiving end of acts of intimidation often respond by self-silencing to avoid future unpleasant experiences. They might become timid and lack the courage to challenge those who arrogantly try to defend a pre-eminent status. Humiliation has similar effects. Those who are often publicly humiliated rarely can find the courage to resist. Often instead, they respond in shame to public dressing downs. Being on the receiving end of such treatment frequently results in a damaging lowering of self-esteem. Hence, intimidation and humiliation are especially effective tactics adopted by those who wish to excel by keeping others down.

But why are arrogant people so keen to diminish others? Why are they so angry? The answer, as Aristotle noted in the Rhetoric 1379a 49- 1379b 2 , lies in their insecurity. It is precisely because deep down those who are arrogant know that they are not superior or uniquely authoritative that they feel the need aggressively to defend their fragile status by bullying other people. Hence, the arrogant are often engaged in elaborate rationalisations. They constantly need to feed their egos, in order to suppress the suspicion that they might not be that special after all.

Featured image credit: “Light Photo” by Jussara Romão. CC0 via Unsplash.

 

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What is kidnap insurance?

Millions of people live and work in areas where they cannot rely on the state to keep them safe. Instead, their security is provided by armed groups: for example, community or clan militias, warlords, rebel movements, drug cartels, or mafias – i.e. local strongmen that can defend their territory against intruders and keep order within it. But their deal with the population usually goes far beyond providing physical security. When armed groups protect property rights, facilitate trade, and offer fair dispute resolution, the local economy grows and with it the protectors’ tax base. As long as the interactions are long-term, the strongmen gain legitimacy and profit from developing a reputation for effective protection, good governance and non-punitive taxation.

But how can business travellers, aid workers, researchers, reporters, and adventurous tourists take advantage of such local informal protection arrangements, given they are on short-term business? Why don’t local criminals (or the protectors themselves) take advantage by preying on (presumably well-off) foreign visitors?

One interesting answer is kidnap insurance – or rather the security advice that is an integral part of insurance when visiting informally governed areas. It is in the financial interest of insurers to minimise the kidnap risks of their customers. Therefore, they use security consultancies to screen their customers’ travel plans and advise companies on how to keep their staff safe. To do so, the security consultancies constantly monitor which protectors are reliable, who is facing challenges, and who has turned rogue.

Kidnap insurance is surprisingly concentrated: almost all kidnap risks are insured or reinsured through special risks insurers represented in the famous insurance market at Lloyd’s of London. The insurers’ security consultants are part of a dense social and professional network and discreetly exchange information with each other. Thus, it becomes possible for informal protectors to develop a reputation for delivering effective protection that will be shared with the people intending to visit their territory.

A modicum of law and order is a necessary precondition for travel, trade, and investment. Unless kidnap risks are kept low, insurers will not insure, and tourists, Western companies, and NGOs will stay away. If security consultants tell companies to evacuate their staff, they know they can no longer fulfil their duty of care and have to put their operations on ice. This drastically reduces local economic performance and hence the protectors’ income. A good reputation for keeping law and order is thus very valuable – both for host governments and informal governance providers within their territory. Although NGOs, companies, travellers, and researchers come and go, the Lloyd’s market creates repeated interactions: security consultancies advise many companies over long periods of time.

Unlike government-provided travel warnings, which tend to advise against all “non-essential travel” for entire regions, commercial travel advice is extremely fine-grained and detailed. By recommending reliable hotels, taxi companies, tour operators, and private security companies, foreign demand for protection is channelled towards enterprises that keep their customers safe even in complex and hostile territories. The exact connections between the approved providers and the protectors usually remain opaque – what matters is reliability. Seeking cheaper alternatives is risky, and the insurance cover is invalidated if companies choose to ignore security advice.

The recent spate of Islamist attacks on hotels and shopping areas popular with Western tourists across Africa can thus be explained as a rational economic strategy for insurgent groups to capture (or obtain a cut of) the protection payments. As rebel groups emerge or expand their territory, the effectiveness of local power-brokers may be compromised. Formerly reliable protectors who fight a territorial challenge may turn into predators to raise additional campaign funds. Security consultancies therefore constantly monitor shifts in the local power landscape and inform the insured when and how to modify their behaviour.

When territorial disputes occur, the insured are redirected towards more effective protectors, or evacuated until the situation is settled. For example, in 2015 foreign mining companies received advice to no longer use the Radisson Hotel in Bamako, Mali – which was targeted by Islamist groups only weeks later. Warnings may highlight specific routes that should not be taken, foreigners may be advised to keep a low profile at certain times or avoid events or locations where trouble is expected. The reduced demand for local services creates a strong financial incentive for protectors to re-establish control – or come to some financial compromise with their challengers.

Security advice thus facilitates business and travel in informally governed territory – even when governments advise travellers to avoid a region altogether. Channelling business towards reliable suppliers creates clear incentives to protect rather than prey on short-term visitors. The system only breaks down in times of outright territorial dispute: predation becomes optimal if it denies resources to the competition and swells your own coffers. Thus, if your company’s security advisory tells you to change your hotel or evacuate altogether, it is a good idea to take that advice.

Feature Image Credit: ‘Coins Currency’ by Stevepb. Public domain via  Pixabay .

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When the movie is not like the book: faithfulness in adaptations

The 2018 movies Crazy Rich Asians, It, Black Panther, The House with a Clock in Its Walls, Mary Poppins Returns, and Beautiful Boy have very little in common with one another, except the fact that all are based on popular books. More than half of the top 20 highest grossing films in the UK from 2007-2016 were based on books or comic books. The Publishers Association estimated that movies based on books make 43% more than movies based on original screenplays. However, for moviegoers who have read the source material, there is often the risk of disappointment in going to see such adaptations. What if the film fails to live up to the book? It is quite natural to want the movie to be true to the book, and surely it is not unreasonable to judge the film in part on how well it meets those expectations.

On the other hand, people often say one should judge a movie on its own merits, and pay no attention to matters of faithfulness to the book. The best movies are not necessarily the ones that follow the source material most closely. Careful attention to the source material can make a movie plodding or dull. Sometimes what works on the page simply does not work on the screen.

It is possible, however, to reconcile these two lines of thought. To do so, we need to think about some of the different ways that a film can be (or fail to be) faithful to its source. A film can be true to the story of the book; a film can capture some or all of the main characters accurately; a film can realize fully the book’s tone or mood; and a film can be true to the themes of the book. Some of these kinds of faithfulness are good and important in judging the movie; others are not.

Let’s consider stories. Some adaptations take great pains to make sure that the films follow the story of the original very closely – that the events of the movie are the same as the book, sometimes even preserving the same dialogue, such as The Hunger Games (2012); Gone Girl  (2014), and the BBC mini-series adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1995). Most movies do need to abridge the stories of the books somewhat, since movies are usually about two hours long, and most novels and plays would take far longer to act out – thus the desire to adapt Pride and Prejudice as a miniseries. However, beyond issues of length, it is not hard to produce a movie that is faithful to the story of the original: cast actors whose appearances match the descriptions of the characters in the book; follow the book’s ordering of scenes, dialogue, and action; choose costumes and setting that fit the descriptions given in the book; and so on.

Now consider the kind of fidelity that aims to preserve the themes or ideas of the original book. This means attempting to make a film that foregrounds the same themes, but in a different medium. Doing this is not easy. Consider an example.

Joe Wright’s 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement is quite faithful to the story of the original book. While there are a number of scenes in the novel that are missing or abridged, the main events and characters are preserved – even much of the dialogue survives unchanged. However, the book completely fails to preserve the themes of the book. A.O. Scott focuses on this in his review in the New York Times:

‘Atonement’ is … an almost classical example of how pointless, how diminishing, the transmutation of literature into film can be … The main casualty of the film’s long, murky middle and end sections is the big moral theme — and also the ingenious formal gimmick — that provides the book with some of its intensity and much of its cachet. As the title suggests, ‘Atonement’ is fundamentally about guilt and the attempt to overcome it, and about the tricky, tragically imperfect power of art to compensate for real-life crimes and misdemeanors.

The main character of the book, Briony, attempts to write in order to work through her guilt, and the novel Atonement itself is part of that process. If the film version of Atonement had been presented as if it were a student film made by the fictional character Briony Tallis, we might at least get a better acquaintance with the theme of using an artistic medium as atonement for a wrong. This would of course mean a departure from the original story, however.

It is a creative accomplishment to preserve the ideas of a film from printed page to moving image. But it is not so impressive merely to preserve the story. So we can be right both to say that faithfulness (to story) is unimportant in judging a movie, and also be very concerned to see whether a movie is faithful (to the themes) of the book.

Featured image credit: “Stokesay Court” by PJMarriott. CC BY 3.0 via  Wikimedia Commons .

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W(h)ither the five-paragraph essay

I was surprised to learn from my students that many of them are still being taught to write the five-paragraph essay in high school. You know it: an introductory paragraph that begins with a hook and ends in a thesis statement. Three body paragraphs, each with a topic sentence and two or three pieces of supporting evidence or detail. A conclusion that restates the thesis and summarizes the main points. Transitions throughout.

My colleagues in education tell me that many schools hang onto the five-paragraph form because they believe it is an effective starting point which bootstraps weaker writers. Some are also convinced it is expected on standardized assessments and in college. Yet as Kimberly Hill Campbell and Kristin Latimer point out in their book Beyond The Five-Paragraph essay, such defenders are engaged in wishful, mythical thinking.

The five-paragraph essay, Campbell and Latimer argue, prioritizes a fixed form over cogent thinking, does little to develop a sense of audience, and is counterproductive in terms of standardized testing and college-level writing. The five-paragraph form is a far cry from the essay as originally conceived—by Montaigne—as a witty, thoughtful exploration of ideas. Instead, it flattens a writer’s voice, dulls reasoning, and engenders habits of formulaic exposition that some never shake.

The five-paragraph form seems to have arisen from the schoolroom practice of writing themes, as essays were once called, and the idea goes back to Greek and Roman rhetorical exercises called progymnasmata. These formal exercises made their way into later English practice, and John Locke complained about them in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.

Instead, it flattens a writer’s voice, dulls reasoning, and engenders habits of formulaic exposition that some never shake.

Theme writing emerged in the early twentieth century as the pedagogical norm. Such writing was, as William Coles, Jr., noted in The Plural I, “not meant to be read but corrected.” It was the expository equivalent of the fill-in the blank exercise. Today, the terminology is different—we talk about writing essays or term papers—but the complaint is still valid.

Perhaps the five-paragraph essay hangs on because of the constraints of class size or the inertia of tradition. But there are other approaches that encourage more attention to audience and depth of thought (techniques that good teachers gravitate to even if the five-paragraph form is forced upon them). One is to allow time for exploration of topics as a group. Discussion and debate before writing inevitably helps writers to consider a wider range of perspectives and connections. As writers talk about what sort of evidence and examples are most relevant to a point, they will probably leave the five-paragraph form behind. So talk first, write later.

Another technique is work from models of real writing. Dissecting models in depth helps writers to think about how different structures and voices enhance exposition. A point can be made as a faux rant or a self-deprecating reflection. It can be made as a narrative, a scolding, or a plea. In his book Draft No. 4, writer John McPhee reminisces about his New Jersey high school teacher, who had students write three essays each week, each accompanied by a structural blueprint. This blueprint, McPhee explained, was the student’s own and “could be anything from Roman numerals I, II, III to a leaping doodle with guiding arrows and stick figures.” The lesson stuck with McPhee, and experimenting with different structures is central to his style. “Readers,” McPhee says, “are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about a visible as someone’s bones.”

The five-paragraph essay, I’m afraid, is all skeleton.

Featured image: Writing. Image by StockSnap. CC0 via  Pixabay .

 

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Why do girls outperform boys on reading tests around the world?

All around the world, girls outperform boys on reading tests. Why is this? In and outside of academia, people have been concerned about girls’ under-performance in math, or more generally: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). There have been fewer academic studies and media coverage about boys’ under-performance in reading. This is surprising, since it might offer an explanation for boys’ lagging educational attainment today.

Not too long ago, women were lower educated than men throughout the world. In the second half of the 20th century, the gender gap shrank until it reversed into a female-favorable gap around the 1990s in most Western countries. In most of the Western world, however, blue-collar jobs traditionally held by men are being transferred to developing countries. Since then, some policymakers have started to worry about boys’ underperformance in education.

One possible explanation for men’s lower educational attainment relates to boys’ language skills. In almost all OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development partner) countries boys are less skilled readers and read less for enjoyment.

Girls across 37 countries all have higher reading scores than boys, although there is substantial international variation. Could it be that girls just have more talent for language than boys?

Figure 1. Gender gaps in reading scores in 37 countries

Source: 2000-2015 PISA waves; 1,425,356 students; 59,001 schools; 204 country-year combinations; 37 countries.

Explanations for gender differences in skills often refer to biological or neurological traits of girls and boys. It appears the gender gap in reading performance is not equal between countries, whereas biological and neurological differences between girls and boys are very unlikely to differ (greatly) internationally. If girls had more talent for language than boys only because of biological or neurological traits, this would presumably result in a similar advantage for girls in all countries. As this is not the case, the question is how the international variation in the gender gap in language skills can be explained. As social and institutional factors differ greatly between countries, it is likely that they affect how much girls outperform boys in reading.

Previous studies have convincingly shown that educational systems influence educational inequality between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, but it is interesting to also consider whether they relate to international variation in educational gender inequality. In particular, what is the influence of standardization on gender inequality in reading performance? Standardization refers to the freedom schools have to choose their own textbooks and, courses and course content. If they can decide on these matters themselves, the level of standardization is low. If these decisions are made by a national or lower level government, standardization is high. It is also important to consider differentiation, the age students are selected for tracks in secondary education.

Standardization negatively affects the reading performance of both girls and boys, but this effect is stronger for boys. In countries where teachers and schools have little freedom to choose their own books, courses and course-content, like Greece, boys’ disadvantage in reading is largest. In less standardized countries, like the Netherlands, the gap is considerably smaller. This may be because individual teaching is especially important for less motivated and skilled students, many of whom are boys. Girls’ reading scores are lower when they are selected for tracks at an early age (the age of selection does not affect boys’ reading performance), meaning that in early differentiating countries the female-favorable gender gap in reading is smaller. This could be related to sex differences in brain development that start to emerge during puberty.

It is clear that gender inequality in reading performance is affected by the organization of a country’s educational system. This means that if countries are concerned with tackling boys’ educational under-performance it may be important to critically assess structures of schooling. More freedom for schools to pick textbooks and determine course (content) could increase boys’ reading performance.

Featured image credit: “Books in black wooden Bookcase” by Pixabay. CC0 via Pexels.

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Three big threats to wildlife in 2019

Our Planet, Netflix’s new nature documentary voiced by David Attenborough, arrives on the online streaming platform today. The series explores the wonders of the natural world, focusing on iconic species and stunning wildlife spectacles. However, as well as highlighting the amazing habitats that make up our planet, the series will also reveal the key issues that are currently threatening them. Created in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Our Planet aims to inspire people all over the world to understand this planet we call home.

In 2018, WWF released the latest Living Planet Report. Produced every two years, it is a comprehensive study of trends in global biodiversity and the health of the planet.  This year’s report produced some startling statistics with biodiversity being lost at a rate the WWF says is only seen during mass extinctions. In recent decades wildlife populations have seen a dramatic decline, a 60% decrease in the last 40 years.

The report identifies significant threats to wildlife populations, which include habitat loss, overexploitation, and climate change.

Image credit: “sea-turtles-hatchling” by skeeze. CC BY 2.0 via Pixabay

Increased urbanisation

Dramatic urbanisation has caused species living in urban environments to develop differently from their non-urban counterparts. Urban lizards in particular have shown strong differences in body condition between urban and forest lizards. Certain species of have shown higher levels of parasite infection intensity in urban environments, in comparison to non-urban lizards.

Rising Temperatures

In the last 50 years, global average temperature has risen at 170 times the background rate, and this is having dangerous effects on wildlife populations. Sea turtles are just one species that are being affected by rising temperatures. Unlike humans, the sex of sea turtles is determined by environmental temperatures, which means that warmer nests are resulting in a higher percentage of female sea turtles.

Studies have also shown that moose experience heat stress when summer temperatures rise above the threshold for the season.

It is not a surprise that climate change is affecting polar bears, but warming temperatures are having an effect on female polar bear dens and their ability to produce and nurse cubs. Cubs need to spend adequate time in the snow den so that they are developed enough to survive harsh Arctic spring conditions, and emerge when there is an abundance of prey. A study showed that reproductive success was higher at land-based dens rather than those on the sea ice, suggesting that the continued decline in areas covered by sea ice could affect the survival of polar bear cubs.

Image credit: “Water Vole” by Peter Trimming. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

Ecotourism

Although ecotourism can help to raise awareness of wildlife populations, it can also have severe negative effects on populations. A study conducted on two populations of penguins showed that those exposed to higher levels of tourism displayed changes indicative of chronic stress and decreased immune systems.

WWF argues that we are the last generation who can reverse these trends that are having such a negative impact on the natural world. Research into conservation and how species are adapting to survive in urban environments is a key step towards to living alongside the natural world and halting the destruction of valuable species.

Developments in urban ecology could allow us to better understand how rapid urbanization is affecting wildlife. By gaining a greater understanding of how urbanization changes the way urban species are evolving could lead to better models for sustainability and green cities that could potentially increase urban biodiversity and the health and wellbeing of the wildlife that inhabits them.

There is increasing consumer demand for products that do not damage wildlife, such as whale-safe products that avoid entangling endangered whales in fishing gear.

The population of water voles has been in steady decline due to habitat fragmentation. However, isolated grasslands in Glasgow, Scotland, have been the site of a new population of this endangered species. This unexpected habitat could provide key information for conservation of this species for the future.

Featured image credit: “Blue Marble – 2002” by NASA Goddard Photo and Video. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Why the forgotten alternative translations of classical literature matter

When they are creative, translations and imitations can be the most revealing form of criticism. It is sometimes said that translation is the most intimate form of reading; successful translations are also highly expressive. The English-language heyday of classical verse translation, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, produced works that people still read, enjoy, and study today, beginning with English classics such as Alexander Pope’s Homer and John Dryden’s Virgil. Translation has been central in what we now call the reception of ancient poetry through the ages.

Thanks to increasing scholarly interest, we understand the history of literary translation in English better today than we did only a couple of decades ago. Bibliographical tools have appeared, historical narratives have been published (the weightiest of them the five-volume Oxford History of Literary Translation in English), and critical studies are no longer restricted to a small number of high-profile writers. But the record of printed translation on which this understanding is based reflects only part of the historical phenomenon, and not necessarily a representative part. Translations that never reached a printer may hold as much interest for us as those which were widely read in their own day, and in some cases more. One example recently printed for the first time is the English translation of the Latin epic poem of Lucretius, De rerum natura, by the civil war period writer Lucy Hutchinson. This shows us very clearly how someone quite different from any published translator of Lucretius responded to his epic. Hutchinson may well be its very earliest English translator. Hutchinson was a Puritan, Lucretius was renowned as an atheist. Like all Lucretius’s other translators, Hutchinson was a capable Latinist; but unlike them, she was a woman.

Translations that never reached a printer may hold as much interest for us as those which were widely read in their own day, and in some cases more.

Scholars and editors have been retrieving historical verse compositions from manuscript copies on an occasional and often serendipitous basis for centuries, including, every so often, classical translations. But the low profile of translation in English literary history (for a long time thought of as inferior to original writing) has made for slow progress here. Individual scholars and editors have rescued and published only a few of the most sizeable and eye-catching extant items, such as translations of famous epics. No concerted attempt has ever been made at methodically collecting some of the best of this often amateur work from the English-speaking world’s archives.

But such research can bring to light hitherto unknown English readers and translators. Translating a Greek or Latin verse text was an exercise in which a surprising number of people indulged. Some of them are anonymous. Some belong to social groups previously not much in evidence in the record. Writings by more familiar figures can be recovered too. The private diaries of Warren Hastings, the eighteenth-century statesman, contain remarkable translations of Catullus which Hastings never published. An impressive English version of part of a Horatian epistle appearing in two contemporary manuscripts is likely to have been written by Ben Jonson, the poet and playwright contemporary with Shakespeare.

Plenty of schoolroom translation exercises are certainly extant, but so is much sophisticated work by adults – their translations are often not the amateurish productions we might expect. They are frequently responses to the professional printed translations with which they are familiar, but these responses can be questioning or testing, undercutting, subversive, hostile. They tend to be in some way alternative because, after all, a reader entirely happy with existing translations would have no reason to devote time to creating another. Thus different Catulluses, different Juvenals, different Horaces emerge here from those we know in the familiar or classic English versions. One reason for this must be that innovation, experiment, playfulness, and risk-taking are much more likely to happen among translators who do not have to satisfy a publisher who commissioned their work, and have no public to avoid offending.

By the eighteenth century, English-speaking readers acquired the habit of seeing the world in terms of the ancient works with which they had become so familiar. This familiarity came about partly through a heavily Latin-based education. But it also came about through the burgeoning production of English classical translation, by now at the very forefront of literary endeavour and prestige. What we have not understood until now is how energetically, and with what creativity and sophistication, these readers participated in that production themselves.

Image credit: Citadel Hill Amman Jordan Vacations by LoggaWiggler, public domain via  Pixabay

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Does gender bias influence how people assess children’s pain?

A recently published paper in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology has attracted much media attention for its analysis of a subject that has long been debated: how do our beliefs about male-female differences influence our decision-making? Specifically, do our beliefs about the pain expressions of boys and girls influence our assessment of their pain experience?

The authors found that when adult participants were shown the same video of a young child undergoing a painful procedure, those who were told the child was a boy rated the child as experiencing more pain than those who were told the child was a girl. However, when the analyses controlled for gender biases related to pain expression (i.e., the belief that boys display less pain in their expressions than girls), the difference was no longer present. The results suggest that the observed difference in pain ratings is likely driven by gender biases on the part of the adult observers.

Below Katelynn Boerner (co-author of a recent commentary on this work in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology) dives deeper into these findings with the study’s lead author, Brian Earp.

Katelynn Boerner: The fact that your findings appeared to be driven by female participants is fascinating. What do you make of this?

Brian Earp: Because this was an unexpected finding, we don’t know what to make of it—yet. But it is consistent with the sole previous study about this issue, which involved a preponderance of female participants: 85% of the sample (the researchers recruited from nursing students and psychology majors, who are disproportionately female). So it is possible that their result, too, was driven by female participants. As it happens, the male participants in our study actually rated the pain of the child when it was described as a girl higher than that of the same child when it was described as a boy (albeit not to a statistically significant degree). This is the opposite pattern of results compared to the female participants So there is certainly something interesting going on.

When I was asked by journalists what could explain this female-only bias in rating the “boy” pain higher, I emphasized that any explanation would be entirely speculative. Our study was not designed to answer that question. But the work of philosopher Kate Manne is a potential avenue for further exploration, in particular her theory of misogyny as spelled out in her book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. One aspect of her account is that women and girls may, generally speaking, be socialized to give heightened attention to the needs of males in patriarchal cultures, in part because it is usually adaptive for those with less power to be attuned to the interests of those with more power. If so, it could be the case that females are primed to be especially sensitive to signs of distress or discomfort among males, such as pain-displays, even when the males are still young boys. This is definitely an idea worth testing in future studies.

However, a word of caution is in order. Some media outlets went running with this speculative possibility and emphasized that our initial experiment might be seen as “yet more evidence” of widespread sexism or misogyny (that is, roughly speaking, prejudicial or unjust treatment of females). Such an interpretation was bolstered by headlines saying that our study showed that people “take girls’ pain less seriously” than that of boys. But that phrasing is ambiguous, and on one interpretation, it isn’t what the experiment showed. To be precise, we found that female participants, but not male participants, rated the pain of a gender-ambiguous child as more serious (as in, more severe or intense) when the child was described as a boy. This doesn’t mean that they took the pain of the “boy” more seriously, in the sense that they believed him to be more credible (as erroneously suggested by the New York Times); and it doesn’t mean they judged the “girl” to be overreacting, much less that her pain should be dismissed.

In simplest terms, if you believe that someone is underplaying the pain they feel, it is rational to infer that they are experiencing more pain than they are outwardly showing.

In fact, our finding is equally compatible with (female) participants having judged the “girl” as displaying pain accurately, and the “boy” as displaying pain inaccurately—i.e., underplaying the pain he really was feeling (perhaps due to the relative stoicism that is widely believed to be expected of boys). Indeed, when we controlled for participants’ explicit belief that boys in general display less pain than girls do, the main effect disappeared. In simplest terms, if you believe that someone is underplaying the pain they feel, it is rational to infer that they are experiencing more pain than they are outwardly showing. That wouldn’t have anything to do with sexism or misogyny: in fact, it might just mean that the female participants in our study were better than the male participants at drawing a reasonable inference about a child’s experience of pain. In any event, we did not measure the extent to which participants cared about the pain of the child or believed the child to be a credible reporter.

KB: Other judgment studies have found differences in pain assessment based on other individual factors, such as medical experience/training and parental experience. Do you think such factors may have had any impact on your results?

BE: We did not assess medical experience or training, so we cannot speak to that issue. However, we are planning a replication study among healthcare providers and we will take clinical experience into account. With respect to parental experience, we did record whether participants were parents or not, but we have not done a separate analysis looking at that factor because it was not part of our pre-registered analysis plan. That being said, our data are available here, so anyone interested in looking at that variable in an exploratory way should feel free to do so.

KB: Part of what makes your findings so compelling is that there is not clear evidence for sex differences in the pain experience of children that young. This means the fact that adults are rating the pain of boys and girls differently is likely not based on a true male-female difference in the pain experience of children. How much do you think gender biases imposed by adults, and gender-based socialization in general, impact the sex differences in pain that we see emerge later in adolescence and adulthood?

BE: It is true that existing studies do not reliably support clinically significant differences in “objective” pain tolerance thresholds among boys and girls before puberty. In fact, in our study, participants reported beliefs that are consistent with this: they did not report believing that boys and girls experience different levels of pain. But they did report that boys and girls display different levels of pain, with boys, in general, believed to display less pain than girls. And that may be a reasonable belief. Insofar as boys really are socialized to display less pain than they feel, it might be true that—all else being equal—a given display of pain corresponds to a higher level of felt pain in boys when compared to girls. But there is not a lot of research on this, and it would be very hard to establish empirically. So, we confined ourselves to what participants believe is true of boys as compared to girls when it comes to display of pain. And again, when we controlled for this belief in our statistical model, it eliminated the overall difference in ratings for pain experience. How this bears on sex differences in pain experience, treatment, and so on, that emerge in later adolescence and adulthood is not something we can answer with our existing data.

KB: The fact that the gender of the child in the video was ambiguous enough to be interpreted as female or male is a necessary strength of your experimental design, but also raises a question about how gender expression impacts the biases that influence our decision-making. Do you think you would have found the same results if you used video clips of a more stereotypically masculine boy or feminine girl?

BE: This is an excellent question, and it is something we want to address in follow-up research. A difficulty, of course, is that if a child is more obviously or stereotypically male (or masculine) or female (or feminine), then it would be much harder to do a controlled test where one-and-the-same video or display of pain could be attributed to a boy or girl depending on condition. But it is something our research group has been thinking about and we are considering various ways we might investigate this issue

KB: What do you think physicians and other health professionals should take away from your research?

BE: The main thing they should take away is that our finding is preliminary. It needs to be replicated using a wider array of stimuli, and in studies with healthcare professionals as participants, before we can say with confidence what the real-world implications might be. What we hope to have done is call attention to a very important issue that should be studied in depth in a medical context, so that—if our finding does turn out to have clinical significance—appropriate measures could be taken to ensure fair and adequate treatment of children’s pain regardless of their sex or gender.

 

Featured image credit: Children Sandbox by qimono.  Public Domain via  Pixabay. 

 

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Perchance to dream? Ay, there’s the rub

Last week, I began discussing the puzzling history of the word dream. Today, a rude awakening awaits us. Here is the argument of the post for March 27, 2019 in a nutshell. The Old English form of dream was drēam (the same word, but pronounced differently). Its Germanic cognates were regular: Old Icelandic draumr and Old High German traum. However, the most important cognate, as regards our discussion, is Old Saxon drōm, and I devoted some space to the status of that language and to the poem Heliand “Savior.” The oldest Germanic form of dream must have been draum- (the ending after the hyphen need not bother us). The question turned around the meaning of this outwardly simple form. In Old Icelandic and Old High German, the reflexes (continuations) of draum– meant “dream,” that is, “a vision during sleep,” while in Old English we find only “joy, merriment; singing, music; noise (especially in a mead hall, that is, during festivities).” The Old Saxon word had the senses “state (of affairs),” sometimes with the accent on joy (but the opposite reference occurred too) and sometimes simply “life.” However, Old Saxon drōm also been attested three times with the sense “dream.”

It is hard to understand how “joy; noise, etc” can coexist with “life” and “dream.” That is why some researchers suggested that we are dealing with two different words, one for “dream” and one for “noise,” each with its own etymology. “Life” has somehow fallen by the wayside. Modern dictionaries also often refer to two different old words. I would like to begin with what looks like the most logical conclusion. Since speakers of Old Saxon found the coexistence of such outwardly incompatible senses as “life; existence” (on earth and in heaven) and “dream” (“a vision in sleep”) natural, we seem to be  dealing with one word and have to look for one etymology of Old Germanic draum– (and try to understand where “noise” comes in).

Of course, I am not the first to think so, and of course, the main evidence for this conclusion has always been the usage in Heliand. It will be remembered that the oldest consecutive text in a Germanic language is the fourth-century Gothic Bible. Only parts of the New Testament are extant, but, unfortunately, the early chapters from Matthew have not come down to us, so that we do not know what the Gothic word for “dream” was. If it had survived, all our questions would either have been moot or, conversely, even harder to answer. Given the information at our disposal, modern historical linguists have to combine the senses “life,” “dream,” and “noise (din, music)” in one word.

Obviously, we should not toy with the suggestion that two or more thousand years ago, people cherished the ideas of symbolist poets and depicted life as a dream. After the conversion to Christianity, even life in heaven appeared as a solid part of reality. Another important consideration is this: ever since the emergence of Freudian theories, dreams have been treated as clues to individuals’ subconsciouses and past experiences (often suppressed in later life). To ancient and medieval speakers, dreams were a guide to the future. Time and again, we read about prophetic dreams, and dreams were told only to come true. They were part of reality, not of the fantasy world.

A dream band. Image credit: Chicago Marching Band by sam99929. Pixabay License via Pixabay.

The least predictable sense of Old Saxon drōm is, strangely enough, certain. We know it, because the style of Heliand has an important peculiarity. The narrative in it is based on the endless variation of synonyms. For example, we can read something like the following: “and numerous were brave heroes, / valiant warriors.” The reinforcing phrase always means the same as the main one. In the parable of the narrow gate, righteous people are promised līf ēwig [life eternal], /diurlīcan [glorious] drōm.” Thus, drōm meant the same as līf, and the meaning of līf poses no problems.

The first to contest the idea of two homonyms was the distinguished German scholar Franz Rolf Schröder, who, as early as 1924, suggested that the unifying sense of all the occurrences of drōm was “ecstasy.” I will skip the details and the references (if someone is interested, I’ll be happy to supply them). Schröder’s short contribution was not missed but, in principle, ignored. Indeed, “ecstasy” does not seem to be a fully convincing clue to dream as life, as a vision in sleep, and as noise. Below, I’ll offer my own semantic reconstruction of draum- (for what it is worth, as they say).

I believe that the mental picture of the human world, as it has come down to us from Old Germanic, included two images: of life experienced in our waking state (in Old Saxon, it was called līf; originally, the noun for “life” denoted “body”) and of life experienced in sleep, when everything is intangible and incorporeal. Life in the light of day was apparently associated with vision. By contrast (and this is the least secure part of my hypothesis), life experienced in sleep was described as heard rather than seen. Perhaps Schröder had a point after all: sleep, ecstasy, and noise are easy to imagine as related. Or perhaps nightmares were treated as screeching demons (mare in night-mare and alp– in German Alp-traum were supernatural creatures: alp– is related to elf). Or perhaps “noise” meant “disturbance” rather than “din,” and sleepers believed that they were deafened by those demons (hence the reference to the “roar” they made).

If this reconstruction has merit, draum– originally denoted 1) “life experienced in sleep,” 2) “a vision during sleep,” and 3) “(deafening) clamor.” In Old Saxon, the first meaning was broadened, so that “life experienced in sleep” yielded the sense “life (in general),” and drōm became a synonym of līf. The second and the third meanings did not undergo any changes. In Old English, only “noise” survived and acquired many contextual overtones, as it were (“merry noise,” “music,” etc.). Old Icelandic and Old High German retained only the sense “a vision during sleep.” Words broaden and narrow their meaning all the time, so that the processes described above are trivial. As pointed out last week, Engl. dream surfaced with its present-day signification only in the Middle period, most likely, under the influence of Scandinavian (some linguists doubt this idea, but it seems the best there is).

The ultimate draugr. Image credit: The Sea Troll by Theodor Kittelsen. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Etymology provides insufficient help in our case. According to one suggestion, draum– is related to Classical Greek thréomai, “I shriek.” This meaning seems to have been made to order to support my hypothesis. But the root of thréomai (and its several Greek cognates, such as thrýlos “noise, din” and throûs ~ throós “shouting”) goes back to draugma-, and the presence of g in the Germanic root draum– (from draugm-?) is questionable, though not improbable. The root with g occurs in the German word for “deception” (Trug) and the Icelandic word for “ghost” (draugr). Yet nightly visions do not seem to have been identified with deception (as mentioned above, the opposite is true), even though ghosts perverting reason and confusing people go well with the demons mentioned above. Other etymologies of the Germanic noun presuppose so much phonetic legerdemain that they can hardly be taken seriously. If draum did have g in the root, the putative Greek congeners lend credence to the idea of draum– as the name of a world of deafening noise. In Germanic, this world seems to have been associated with (disturbed, unquiet) sleep.

Our story has several elements that compensate for the uncertainty of the final conclusion: demons on all sides, deafening noise merging with merry music, life on two planes (one for seeing, the other for hearing), and an evasive consonant, with all that being combined in a dream. So I ask you: Are there many areas in the humanities more absorbing than historical semantics?

Featured image: “How wonderful is sleep….” (P. B. Shelley, Queen Mab, line 1). Children sleeping by Annie Spratt. Public Domain via Unsplash. 

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